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拍品专文
Painted between 22 and 31 July 1993, Abe is a powerful example of Georg Baselitz’s ability to set abstraction and figuration against each other, suspending the two in a vital, electrifying opposition. A vibrant, shocking red hovers over the surface of the painting, barely reaching its sides: the theatrical curtain of colour insists on its own physicality, on its own dominant presence in space. Into this surface, Baselitz carves his design, physically scoring the red expanse with sinuous lines of blue and brown. With each mark, Baselitz upends the rarified modernist tradition of monochromatic abstraction; instead, the artist sketches out the rudimentary outline of a figure with a raised fist, a leitmotif which has recurred over some fifty years of his career. With a final effortless scattering of unevenly applied daubs of paint, Baselitz creates a image which ceaselessly and mesmerizingly oscillates, coming together into a figure, then dissolving back into abstraction. For the artist, ‘a painting is built one brushstroke at a time. You can see the figure or you can see the brushstrokes. It doesn’t really matter to the painter’ (G. Baselitz, quoted in, M. Auping, ‘Georg Baselitz: Portraits of Elke’, in Georg Baselitz: Portraits of Elke, exh. cat., Fort Worth, Museum of Modern Art, 1997-1999, p. 30).
Since the beginning of his career in the 1960s, Baselitz’s concern has been to distance himself from all accepted norms in art: the practices of Art Informel favoured in Western Europe, the Socialist Realism sanctioned by East Germany and the discourses of American abstraction. By turning the painted world on its head, now such a hallmark of his work, he sought to entrench the power of the figurative image by reenergising it, to reinvest realism with a new sense of purpose. ‘Painting is not a means to an end,’ the artist explained this decision. ‘On the contrary; painting is autonomous. And I said to myself: if this is the case, then I must take everything which has been an object of painting – landscape, the portrait and the nude, for example – and paint it upside-down. That is the best way to liberate representation from content’ (G. Baselitz, quoted in Georg Baselitz, exh. cat., Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1995, p. 71). Liberating painting from convention and custom, in Abe, Baselitz makes a powerful case for the vitality of the medium.
Since the beginning of his career in the 1960s, Baselitz’s concern has been to distance himself from all accepted norms in art: the practices of Art Informel favoured in Western Europe, the Socialist Realism sanctioned by East Germany and the discourses of American abstraction. By turning the painted world on its head, now such a hallmark of his work, he sought to entrench the power of the figurative image by reenergising it, to reinvest realism with a new sense of purpose. ‘Painting is not a means to an end,’ the artist explained this decision. ‘On the contrary; painting is autonomous. And I said to myself: if this is the case, then I must take everything which has been an object of painting – landscape, the portrait and the nude, for example – and paint it upside-down. That is the best way to liberate representation from content’ (G. Baselitz, quoted in Georg Baselitz, exh. cat., Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1995, p. 71). Liberating painting from convention and custom, in Abe, Baselitz makes a powerful case for the vitality of the medium.