(born Deutschbaselitz, Saxony in 1938)
Untitled, signed, dated Baselitz 60, mixed media (ink, dispersion), collage on canvas, 60 x 50 cm, framed, (PS)

Provenance:
Private Collection, Germany

Photo certificate:
Georg Baselitz Archive, Munich, 2 September 2014

We are grateful to Mr Detlev Gretenkort of the Archiv Georg Baselitz for his kind assistance.

Georg Baselitz’s works run roughshod over the boundaries usually drawn between the traditional categories of drawing, oil painting and graphic design. It is the graphic quality which is crucial, not the technique. The different media are not only of equal value, they pervade one another. Even in his early works, Baselitz’s drawing demonstrates a close relationship with handwriting, its distinctive flow in the different phases ensuring the unity of the whole:

Image and content develop from blobs of colour, short dashes and looping lines, from dabs and washed surfaces. In doing so the graphic elements lose any descriptive character; they are pure shapes which come to life through the process of their creation, only incidentally associated with a motif. The amorphous structures solidify into shapes, viewed from distorted and unfamiliar perspectives, evoking three-dimensional volumes and charging the monochrome background. Baselitz’s early work is identified by his rejection of, and release from, non-representational art. The challenge this brings is to fix the figure to the background so that the entire format of the work unfolds as a comprehensive, organised expanse.

“The most reliable way of creating something without base colours is to use a black or white ground on which one paints in black or in the opposite colour. And if one really avoids this blending, if clarity is maintained, if the ground remains black and the drawing on it is white, then nothing can actually go wrong with the dominant vocabulary.”
Georg Baselitz in conversation with Siegfried Gohr 1996, quoted in: Über Baselitz, Aufsätze und Gespräche 1976-1996, Cologne 1996