Buono due rosa

Painted in 2015, the year the artist was included in the 56th Venice Biennale, Georg Baselitz’s Buono due rosa evinces a fervid, feverish motion. A spiral of disembodied legs spins clockwise as if compelled to dance forevermore. The ghosts of the artist’s iconic upside-down figures shimmer in their silvery forms, with two legs inverted in mirror-image of the pair below. Legs and feet have been a recurrent motif for Baselitz since his 1963 series P. D. Feet; he sees feet as his ‘earth-wire’, explaining that ‘for me the reception via an earth-wire is much better than through an antenna’ (G. Baselitz in conversation with F. Illies, 2006, in J. Lloyd, Georg Baselitz: Collected Writings and Interviews, Manchester 2010, p. 282). The distinctive cruciform arrangement seen here first appeared in the artist’s work in 2001 and has since evolved through various series, including his ‘Mexico’ works of 2005-2006—inspired by Mexican dances and Frida Kahlo’s wooden leg—and in his 2009 appropriations of works by Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg. In the year of the present work, Baselitz would revive the motif in a closely-related series of paintings for Glyndebourne Festival Opera, conjuring references to Bach, Mozart, Wagner and folk rhythms. ‘I try to catch the music … in a golden frame’, he explained (G. Baselitz, quoted in George Baselitz, exh cat., White Cube, London 2015, n. p.). The centrifugal motion of the present work is similarly infused with a sense of musical drive, spinning eternally through time and space.