Georg Baselitz at the Gagosian Gallery, Rome, Italy, Sep 23 - Nov 8

Exhibition Description:

Gagosian Gallery announces an exhibition of new paintings and drawings by Georg Baselitz. These works are a part of his ongoing Remix series.

Baselitz's long and challenging career has distinctly intense periods of activity, usually resulting in a heroic masterpiece or group of master works. This is typically followed by a startling renewal and rethinking of his subject. A traditional artisan, Baselitz works in equally traditional media; painting, drawing, printmaking, and wood sculpture - often on a monumental scale.

The recent Remix Paintings revisit the most provocative aspects of Baselitz's own history. As part of an ongoing series, these new works re-examine his iconic painting The Big Night Down the Drain, 1962-63. This piece is now in the collection of the Museum Ludwig, Cologne. It depicts a faceless, masturbating boy whose identity is unclear. When it was first exhibited in Berlin in 1963, the police confiscated the work due to its provocative content.

Baselitz has re-examined The Big Night Down the Drain using his own photographs of the painting to aid the process of recollection. In contrast to the original version which took him several months to complete, these new works are finished in a matter of hours.

Against a stark white background, Baselitz adjusts the individual elements of the original painting, from clearer articulations of motifs to brighter colors, and adds new motifs such as the skull, to represent his response to his contemporary context.

George Baselitz was born in 1938. His impulse to improve, clarify, and update is clearly distinctive, but the haunting, fleeting quality of this ongoing theme has also to do with a mature artist's meditations on war, time, presence, failure and possibility. He has exhibited extensively in solo and group exhibitions internationally since the early sixties.

He was the subject of a major retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1995, traveling to the Los Angeles County Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C., and the Nationalgalerie, Berlin. In 2007, the Royal Academy of Arts in London, also conducted a retrospective of his work.

He has work resident in many public collections including the Museum Ludwig, Cologne; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Tate Modern, London.

George Baselitz lives outside Munich, Germany and Imperia, Italy.

Full Contact Details:

Gagosian Gallery
Rome
Via Francesco Crispi 16
00187 Rome

The gallery will be closed from August 9 through 24.
TEL 39.06.4208.6498
FAX 39.06.4201.4765
EMAIL roma (at) gagosian.com
HOURS Tue-Sat 10:30-7 & by appointment