Focus Albertinum: Georg Baselitz
17 August 2023Focus Baselitz
On the occasion of the 85th anniversary of the artist's birth, the Albertinum of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden (SKD) will be showing works by Georg Baselitz from its own holdings as of today to 7 January 2024. Supplemented by works from the Günther and Annemarie Gercken Foundation, which is based at the SKD, seven paintings from different creative periods of the Saxon world star can be seen in the small presentation.
Born and raised in Deutschbaselitz near Kamenz, Georg Baselitz (* 1938 as Georg Kern) visited the Dresden Art Collections as a teenager in the mid-1950s, which he describes in a 2013 interview (Georg Baselitz. Background Stories, SKD 2013, p. 45ff) as "the foundation" for his own creative work. Here he continues: "As an artist, you work against the images that already exist, but also with them". These references are also reflected in some of the works shown: "Statement" (1999), for example, refers to Raphael's "Sistine Madonna" (1512/13), "The Bridge Ghost's Supper" (2006) to the artists of the BRÜCKE.
In Dresden in 1956, Baselitz saw paintings by Ferdinand von Rayski, among others. After his landscape study "Wermsdorfer Wald" (c. 1859), which also hung as a reproduction in Baselitz's school, the artist painted various forest pictures from 1969 onwards. This series of works marks the beginning of a peculiarity of his painting that lasted for decades: from now on, Baselitz turns his motifs upside down.
