October 11, 2012 |
3) The Church (Die Kirche), 1986, Georg Baselitz, shown by Galerie Thomas Modern
Painting things upside down has become Georg Baselitz’s calling card. Since 1969 the father of German neo-expressionism has stuck to this strategy, delivering a skewed vision of a skewed world to sit alongside the seething works that first made his name.
When he moved to West Germany as a student in the early 1960s, Baselitz was haunted by memories of the Nazis, and his first-hand experience of the ideologies of the GDR. He found himself negotiating a rebuilt society in which he detected a buried guilt in the apparently laissez-faire attitude to the recent past. Paintings such as his iconic Die große Nacht im Eimer from 1962, with its shrunken boy man with an angry red cock poking from his open flies, realised with thick, scatological smears of paint, brought Europe’s dark heart, the memories of the war and its atrocities, shuddering to the surface.
The imagery Baselitz has since tipped on its end typically has a German resonance: eagles, the haunting forests and mountains that dominated the work of Romantic artists such as Caspar David Friedrich, blonde women with too-pink skin. The church has a particularly loaded history, from the Reformation to the Catholic collusion with the Third Reich.
Georg Baselitz
The Church (Die Kirche) (1986)
Oil on canvas
254 x 210cm / 99 5/8 x 82in
Courtesy: Galerie Thomas Modern 2012
by Skye Sherwin
