(born in Deutschbaselitz, Saxony in 1938)
Mond, 1989–2014, bronze, signed Baselitz, numbered 1/9, 46.5 x 51.5 x 12 cm, height (incl. wooden base) 94 cm

Provenance:
Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, London/Paris/Salzburg
acquired from the above by the present owner 2015 – Private Collection, France

The German artist Georg Baselitz has shaped modern painting since the 1960s thanks to his provocative work, which displays fresh form and content time and again. Leaving behind his established medium, from 1979/80 onwards he created numerous figurative sculptures from roughly worked wood, with layers of colour partly applied using the impasto technique. The artist’s preferred tools are the chainsaw and axe. His sculpture is basic, impetuous and energetic. He avoids any kind of elegance and ignores the rules of craftsmanship: instead he saws, hacks and pierces the material with great physical effort.
The irregular indentations and relief-style marks on the wood are tangible traces of his handiwork and the tool he uses. In addition to the sculptures of Expressionism, an important field of reference for Baselitz’ sculpture is the fundamental, archetypal stylistic idiom of African sculpture.

This work, Mond (Moon), is one of the cast bronze pieces that were created in a small run from 2003 onwards, reproducing every detail of the surface of the worked wood. The bronze is taken from a wooden sculpture of the same name dating from 1989, which was created in the same period as the “Dresden Women” wooden busts. The traces of the saw on the round disk are like a disentanglement puzzle, and are constantly shifting between an abstract drawing and the features of the laughing face of the man in the moon. The black patina of the bronze, which does not reflect light, increases the mysterious intensity of the sculpture. The moon is no longer a golden disc that reflects the sun’s light: it is a dark, weighty celestial body. The idea of the disappearance of the visible, which was so important in the artist’s oeuvre, is just as powerfully embodied here as in his painting, where he inverts figurative motifs.
Georg Baselitz, born as Hans-Georg Kern in Deutschbaselitz (Saxony) in 1938, lives and works in Salzburg.

“I think that sculpture is a more direct way than painting to approach the same issue, because sculpture is more primitive, more brutal, and lacks the reserve that you find in painting.”
Georg Baselitz in conversation with Jean-Louis Froment and Jean-Marc Poinsot, in: Georg Baselitz. 30 Jahre Skulptur, Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Berlin, Distanz Verlag, 2009, p. 60 / English pp. 66-67