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Lot Essay
‘I was born into a destroyed order and I didn’t want to re-establish an order.’
—GEORG BASELITZ
With its myriad electric blue spots and curved lines layered onto a striking red background, Georg Baselitz’s Cebe gives off a glowing brilliance. Painted in 1993, Cebe is a compelling demonstration of Baselitz’s practice of the early 1990s, exemplifying the artist’s experimentation with his signature upside-down figure at this time. First scrawling an inverted face onto the canvas with primal power and urgency, Baselitz then buries it in a thicket of lines and dots, stretching the figure into abstraction beneath the daubs and streaks of his royal blue paint. These blue marks convey a vague sense of the natural world, their shapes formulating and reformulating into arcing stems, leopard print, scattered seeds, or even tadpoles flitting around the canvas; yet in the work’s luminous colour scheme this sense of nature, like the viscerally crude, inverted figure himself, feels corrupted or deformed, even as the work exudes a vital, irradiated effervescence. Since he exploded into the art world in the 1960s, a sense of corruption, or disorder, has occupied Baselitz’s painting. Along these lines, the critic Michael Brenson has written of Baselitz’s paintings from this period, with their spread of oddly organic forms, as twisted takes on Monet’s Water Lilies; as he says, ‘[I]n Baselitz’s late-20th century world, nature has been too roughed up, too exploited, too toxified, to allow for a religion of landscape… The way these marks emphasize the pictorial surface tells the viewer to keep out. If the natural world within these paintings is mortal, nature in them is not. Baselitz wants to make his paintings an expression of a life force essential to natural and human life but with little relation to the way either of them looks and feels’ (M. Brenson, George Baselitz: Recent Paintings, exh. cat., The Pace Gallery, New York, 1992, p. 13). Perhaps paradoxically, this is the case in Cebe: the toxic and life-giving qualities of Baselitz’s painting collide to enthralling effect.
—GEORG BASELITZ
With its myriad electric blue spots and curved lines layered onto a striking red background, Georg Baselitz’s Cebe gives off a glowing brilliance. Painted in 1993, Cebe is a compelling demonstration of Baselitz’s practice of the early 1990s, exemplifying the artist’s experimentation with his signature upside-down figure at this time. First scrawling an inverted face onto the canvas with primal power and urgency, Baselitz then buries it in a thicket of lines and dots, stretching the figure into abstraction beneath the daubs and streaks of his royal blue paint. These blue marks convey a vague sense of the natural world, their shapes formulating and reformulating into arcing stems, leopard print, scattered seeds, or even tadpoles flitting around the canvas; yet in the work’s luminous colour scheme this sense of nature, like the viscerally crude, inverted figure himself, feels corrupted or deformed, even as the work exudes a vital, irradiated effervescence. Since he exploded into the art world in the 1960s, a sense of corruption, or disorder, has occupied Baselitz’s painting. Along these lines, the critic Michael Brenson has written of Baselitz’s paintings from this period, with their spread of oddly organic forms, as twisted takes on Monet’s Water Lilies; as he says, ‘[I]n Baselitz’s late-20th century world, nature has been too roughed up, too exploited, too toxified, to allow for a religion of landscape… The way these marks emphasize the pictorial surface tells the viewer to keep out. If the natural world within these paintings is mortal, nature in them is not. Baselitz wants to make his paintings an expression of a life force essential to natural and human life but with little relation to the way either of them looks and feels’ (M. Brenson, George Baselitz: Recent Paintings, exh. cat., The Pace Gallery, New York, 1992, p. 13). Perhaps paradoxically, this is the case in Cebe: the toxic and life-giving qualities of Baselitz’s painting collide to enthralling effect.