Loch Gewesen

Baselitz is considered a figurative artist, but as he said in a rare interview, he does not like "pictures that tell stories" (quoted in B. Barker, Georg Baselitz: Paintings Bilder 1962-1988, London 1990, p. 8). Since the late 1960s, he has used the device of the inverted image to strip his paintings of any narrative dimension and to focus the viewer's attention on the painted surface. Loch Gewesen belongs to a group of works created by artist in the early 1990s, in which he used a limited palette of blacks and whites as well as occasional pinks and military greens. Its sibylline title, which may be translated as "there was/had been a hole," alludes to its strong sexual charge: Baselitz depicts a female nude in a state of sexual arousal. As in other paintings in this series including Torso 65, (1990), Ida, (1992), and Schwester Liebchen (Sister Darling), (1992), he reduces the human figure to a mere outline, and he attacks its physical integrity. The body is broken: the head, the lower legs and the right hand are missing. The sketchily drawn, jittery contours contribute to the sense of dismemberment and dislocation. The figure has become, so to speak, an object that lends itself to artistic manipulation. Baselitz painted this work with both a brush and his feet by applying paint to the bottom of his shoes. The shoe prints that make up the breast are yet another expression of artistic self-assertion.