Baselitz is one of the few contemporary artists whose work is deeply rooted in the history of European and American painting. He is seen as the inventor of a figurative pictorial language that draws on a rich repertoire of iconographic and stylistic elements, although these, in his visual inventions, take on conflicting and ambivalent meanings. Baselitz's artistic cosmos is like a hall of mirrors in which original, remembered and imagined blend with art-historical models and precedents to form new and striking compositions.
The powerful and exciting works in exhibition, from every phase of the artist's career, reveal the full thematic and stylistic range of his exceptional oeuvre. Key works from the 1960s, with a selection of the Hero and Fracture paintings, will feature in the exhibition, together with examples of the inverted images for which Baselitz became famous in the 1970s and 80s. A selection of the artist's large-format wood sculptures will include his first exercise in this medium: the painted wood piece that caused a political scandal when it was exhibited at the 1980 Venice Biennale. Paintings from the later Remix series and from recent years complete the survey of the work of one of the most original artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
The retrospective assembles some ninety paintings and twelve sculptures from 1959 to the present day, with loans from renowned public and private collections in Europe and the USA.
The exhibition has been organized in cooperation with the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington DC, where it will be shown subsequently in a modified form. In parallel with the presentation at the Fondation Beyeler, the Kunstmuseum Basel will be exhibiting a selection of Baselitz's works on paper.
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Exhibition Dates: January 21 - April 29, 2018
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