Georg Baselitz’s Tränen stands as a raw, evocative painting that oscillates between figuration and abstraction, grief and flight. Painted in 1986, the work belongs to a critical period in Baselitz’s career, when he was refining his iconic inversion technique and pushing the psychological intensity of his subjects to new extremes. The title plays on the German word “tears” or “birds”. Here, the artist presents a field of heavy, dark forms - each tear-shaped, yet also suggestive of birds, heads, or shrouded figures - hovering like phantoms across a densely worked surface.

The ambiguity in the title is central to the painting’s force: the elongated, oval forms might drip like tears, but they also resemble birds at rest—hunched, downcast, weighted by an invisible force. Rendered in thick, sculptural strokes of grey and black oil paint, the forms are layered upon a chaotic and expressive ground. Underneath, slashes of rust red, blue, and yellow emerge like glimpses of buried emotion, hinting at an unstable terrain of memory and loss.

The work embodies Baselitz’s interest in painting as a site of existential confrontation. The painterly gestures are emphatic and physical, almost violent in their application. The black forms dominate the canvas like a chorus of mourning - suggesting anonymity, repetition, and perhaps even a crowd of mute witnesses. The technique recalls the expressive brutality of Art Brut and the existential weight of postwar German painting, but Baselitz resists narrative closure. Instead, he immerses the viewer in a space of visual contradiction: the forms float but fall, they are bodies yet not quite human, they weep and take flight.

Painted just over four decades after the end of World War II, Tränen can be understood as part of Baselitz’s reckoning with Germany’s cultural and historical trauma. Having grown up in the ruins of East Germany, Baselitz has long engaged with the tension between personal memory and national history. His works resist sentimentality, instead embracing a fractured, often grotesque aesthetic as a way to process collective psychic wounds. In Tränen, that tension is palpable—the birds/tears might signal transcendence, but they are rendered in funereal hues, tethered to the ground of the canvas like the weight of grief itself.

Deeply emotional and challenging intellectually, Tränen captures Baselitz’s masterful ability to translate the invisible—trauma, memory, sorrow—into something brutally tangible. The painting’s ambiguity is part of its power: it leaves room for mourning without dictating its cause, allowing the viewer to confront their own associations with loss and collective memory. Through its repetition, texture, and evocative abstraction, Tränen exemplifies how painting can speak to both the personal and the historical, resisting closure while insisting on the persistence of grief.