Baselitz

Baselitz in his studio

            At the Gagsoian on 21^st it’s hard to enter a space that seems like I need to pay admission. The building is cold and empty. Its so large it makes the paintings inside look small. Yet, Gagsoian was full of Baselitz paintings, about 10 of them measuring at least 12 feet high, and a very large wooden sculpture but they appeared small. It blew me away how paintings that were bigger than my bed could ever seem small. Yet the paintings still grappled me into their gaze.

            The paintings finally consumed me when the blinders came on after the initial shock of how small such big paintings could look. Their figurative works, defiantly. Yet they lend so much of the mark making of gestural abstraction, specifically late Pollock. This relationship between the two (Pollock and Baselitz) kept me entertained for quite sometime. Baselitz’s use of the black drip interwoven with strong wide brush marks articulates different parts of the body. It vividly relates to the late Pollock’s where on one side there is a world of drips then countering that is a portrait carved out of drips and color.

Jackson Pollock. Portrait and a Dream.1952. 

            Baselitz then folds the painting in half or maybe he painted the first part while it was folded. Regardless there is a crease in the painting which, in some of the paintings, signals the entrance of a black ground while for others it’s empty with some brush marks occasionally entering the picture. It’s an exquisite corpse type process to build the figure. Which is similar to the separation of two distinct parts in Pollock’s late work. Some are hung upside-down which is a technique Baselitz likes to employ. It destabilizes the ground and therefore subverts where the normative gravity should exist.

            All of these extreme gestures are glamorous. In the first painting you encounter, to the left of the entrance, the top part has gold dust sprinkled in the paint. The brush marks must be six inches wide yet look like a small one-inch brush because of the enveloping size of the canvas. Everything screams for the heroic. By all means it does. The painting behind the sculpture contains a row of high-heeled shoes pointing up in the air, suggesting women on their backs. Submissive. Masculine to the core, disgusting at times, but they are still so alluring. I felt dirty.

            The color is perverse, borderline ugly. It’s not ugly like certain bodily fluids. But more like how colors would accumulate around a drain used by runway models after a fall fashion show. Makeup tans, pinks, oranges, and reds are harnessed to develop the figures. Baselitz controls these colors by using the drips as a grid that lay over the vain color to articulate the forms.

                  “I don't want to create a monster, I want to make something which is new, exceptional, something that only I do...something that references tradition, but is still new.

–Georg Baselitz”¹

            What happens when these paintings are now only tradition? They don’t seem new or exceptional. They show dominance over nature, women, and painting. Those ideas all are very dated. The handling of paint makes me feel embarrassed which was one of the most intimate experiences I achieved while looking at the work. I stepped closer to inspect the surface more vividly.

“Sir”

I saw the dust of gold clinging to the surface at the end of a brush mark.

“Sir!”

I looked over and was surprised by the guard gesturing at me wildly to step away from the painting. I was satisfied.

            I apologized and shuttered. The coldness was back, so I decided to leave. I took a right walking out the door and saw a man with a Spiderman cap on. He was filling a tiny gallery with artwork from the floor to ceiling, nothing for sale. I stopped by and he was happy to chat about it and how it was an open call to all his supporters: “The Internets”.  I took my sweater off.     

¹This quote came from the Gagsoinan website. It brings up an interesting question about perceptions and the timely vs. timeless. Baselitz vs. a contemporary viewer. http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/georg-baselitz--february-28-2012