Immer bereit für die Vergangenheit

Immer bereit für die Vergangenheit, 2010, belongs to the series of Remix Paintings inaugurated by Georg Baselitz in 2005, which revisit and reinterpret key works from his own canon. A double portrait featuring a woman and a man side by side standing upon tables, Immer bereit für die Vergangenheit, or ‘Always ready for the past’, takes as its point of departure the rallying cry of the East German youth organization, the Young Pioneers, to which Baselitz belonged as a boy. Painted upside down with arms raised in the Pioneers’ salute, the two figures are flatly illustrated with scratchy black outlines against an acidic yellow background. Inspired by his predecessor, Otto Dix’s 1924 painting, Die Eltern des Künstlers II (The parents of the artist II), which depicts Dix’s elderly parents seated next to one another. here Baselitz engages with the tradition of German Realism, revisiting both an intensely personal and collective history.

Since German Reunification in 1990, Baselitz’s painting has increasingly centered on notions of memory and the past. He observes of his Remix Paintings, “If you take the term remix from music…it means you rescue something in a new time, or, for example, you bring it into the new time. That doesn’t mean you rehash it, but instead that you use quite specific essences, basic themes, in order to reformulate it” (G. Baselitz, Georg Baselitz in conversation with Okwui Enwezor in U. Wilmes (ed.), Georg Baselitz: Back Then, In Between and Today, Munich, 2014, p. 23). Reviewing vital motifs from his early oeuvre, such as his renowned technique of inverting the subject, Baselitz enters into a dialogue with his own practice, offering fresh perspective on the themes that have occupied him across his decades-long career.