Artists

Georg Baselitz

Press release

The exhibition Georg Baselitz. Eroi d'Oro, curated by Luca Massimo Barbero, director of the Institute of Art History of the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, features the German artist's most recent series of large-scale paintings. The golden planes that form the grounds of the works on view offer no illusion of depth; they create a flatness reminiscent of medieval icons or the gilded backgrounds of the works of Northern Renaissance painter Stefan Lochner. Georg Baselitz's painted bodies, executed in sharp lines, lie bare across these grounds as if floating on their surfaces, rendered through an approach that inherits from line drawing. They include larger-than-life self-portraits, as well as numerous depictions of the artist's wife, Elke, his lifelong companion and recurring model. Applied with diluted black paint that resembles ink, the spectral portraits hark back to Hokusai's portraits and Japanese calligraphy. While gold has always held diverse connotations and functions within his practice, never before have Baselitz's paintings borne such a direct resemblance to icon painting.