Georg Baselitz

Galerie Heiner Friedrich, Munich
Galerie Neuendorf, Hamburg

Undoubtedly the most significant change of Baselitz’s career occurred in 1969, when he committed himself to the radical inversion of the subjects and motifs of his paintings.  Following this initial breakthrough, Baselitz painted a series of intimate portraits between 1971-73 of himself and his wife, and Fingermalerei Akt represents one of the artist’s strongest self-portraits from this period.  In these canvases, figures are free from distortion and the backgrounds are more legible than elsewhere in his oeuvre.  Baselitz regarded the self-portrait motif as being descriptive yet devoid of specific narrative and content; a dispassionate form that liberated him to explore shape, colour and surface.  In a series of outstanding self-portraits executed around this time, Baselitz directly exposed his body to this process.  Hieratic and completely nude, the viewer is presented with an uncompromising view of the artist as hero.  The blue drape covering his right shoulder does nothing to uphold the artist’s modesty, but rather provides a strong visual reference to the grandeur of Classical statuary.  This work is a fine example of Baselitz’s ‘finger-painting’ technique, executed at a time when he was busy experimenting with different methods for spreading the pigment onto his canvases.  The result here is conspicuously loose, with signs of sketchiness co-existing within a firmly established structure.  Baselitz places the emphasis primarily on the substance of paint and on the intimate process of its creation, as opposed to the degree of figurative accuracy.  However, by directly applying paint using only his hands and fingers, Baselitz created a self-portrait which surpasses mere representation, becoming an extension of the artist’s character and body in its own right. 

The reversal of the motif in his paintings liberated him to fully explore his preoccupation with painting as an independent entity separate from illusion or narrative.  Through the process of inversion, Baselitz neutralises the significance of his motifs, depriving them of their emotive power, as he reflected: “The object expresses nothing at all. Painting is not a means to an end. On the contrary, it is autonomous.  I must take everything which has been the object of painting…and paint it upside down.  That is the best way to liberate representation from content.” (Diane Waldman in Exhibition Catalogue, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Georg Baselitz, 1995, p.71)