Andrea Schlieker on Georg Baselitz at White Cube Bermondsey | White Cube

[00:00:01]I think what Baselitz shows us here is a man who has had an incredibly fruitful, productive, restless career. He was very preoccupied with creating works right to the last moment. The title of this exhibition is back again which reflects on the methodology of Baselitz because he returned time and again to particular motifs. These motifs are Elker his wife partner and longtime use the eagle and the hero paintings. He made these works 30 paintings between 23 and 25. So are amongst the last paintings he made before his passing in April and in many ways they are a summation of his entire career. He was very concerned in the last years of his life to create what he called a spet, a late work. And that late work became more and more crystallized in the repeat of these themes that he pushed time and again even though the themes were the same but the way he painted became more and more radical, more and more reflecting his own aging. He was born as Hunts Gayok Kelm and in 1961 he changed his name to Baselitz Gayok Baselitz and that really is a tribute to his place of birth. He had to use his own biography and his own biography is predominant throughout 60 years of his life. The area where he grew up in Deutsch Barelitz became so vitally important to him. Um as a young boy he started making drawings of the area of the nature of eagles for example and he kept on returning to these early drawings to refine them to push them and the work has become ever more reflective. The eagle is one of the most important recurring motifs in Bositz's work. He grew up during the second world war under the Nazi regime but then that area of Germany became the GDR in 1949.

[00:02:22]So he lived under socialism and as a student he moved first to East Berlin was then expelled for apparently political immaturity and moved to the capitalist west. So he had all these different experiences of Germany. And the eagle has always been a heraldic symbol for Germany. But his eagle is a wounded eagle. It's a fighting eagle.

[00:02:47]It's a damaged eagle. It's an eagle that often plunges down to the ground. In this painting, we really see something quite radical that has happened over the last few years in Barcel's and that is that he has included the signs of his aging, of his loss of mobility. In order to paint, Baselitz has always painted on the floor in his large studio. And for the last few years, he has been using an office chair that has been turned into a kind of wheelchair which he's moving around on top of the canvas. And you can see the striations of the wheels that have soaked up the paint and that gives the painting a real dynamism and energy.

[00:03:35]We're standing in front of the work that really shows Baselitz himself. You can recognize his features. And the background is always painted with a gold paint, but the figure itself that seems to be floating, sitting, falling, is simply made with a stick or a thin brush like writing almost like calligraphy.

[00:04:02]Each of the paintings has a very surprising if you want of bright colors. For Baselitz that was a reference to his great hero William Dunning. So for him this is not only a nod to Duning but also it is part of his mischievous way of working that you always find something unexpected in his paintings something that he calls in this case just decoration. The use of gold has become quite prominent in recent years and it may be a sign of reflecting back on his time in Italy as a young student where he studied the work of for example Ducho and other early Renaissance artists. What the gold does here is that it isolates the body. The bodies have an almost transcendental metaphysical appearance. They seem to float and they're no longer part of this earth. So it seems they're already in another state. These are no longer the bodies of Elka and Gayok in their prime. These are the bodies of two people in their old age. You see an artist who is one of the most important artists of his generation. We have all seen his work over 60 years and right to the last moment he produces. He makes he is active. He is inventive in his studio by himself.