“Like wallpaper for the Old Masters, that’s what my images will be,” painter Georg Baselitz said of his current exhibition at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, in which he engages in a visual dialogue with artists such as Lucas Cranach, Titian, Peter Paul Rubens. , and the Mannerists (who painted at the court of Emperor Rudolf II, focusing on the nude figure).
“The exhibition concept is also a new high point in the history of Georg Baselitz exhibitions,” Managing Director Sabine Haag said in a statement. “He immediately chose a direct encounter of his works with the works of the Old Masters, in particular Mannerism. Image by image, facing each other, above and below, in the same rooms, in the same visual axes.
The German painter has selected 73 of his own works, dating from the last five decades, to intersperse them with 40 works from the museum. It includes loans from renowned institutions such as the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; the Albertina, Vienna; and the Center Pompidou, Paris.
View of the exhibition “Baselitz: Naked Masters”. © KHM-Museumsverband
“The works focus on the nudity of the painter and his wife, Elke, who has always been his only model to this day,” curator Andreas Zimmermann said in a press release. “They include late images – up to four meters wide – which deal with physicality and age, which are striking in their concomitant fragility and monumentality. The works presented in the exhibition also bear witness to the painter’s mutability: finger paintings, bold brushstrokes, paintings as light as a feather and, more recently, collages. The element of surprise, the perpetual rediscovery of the method of painting is one of the fundamental structural principles of the artist’s work.
The show is open until June 25. See more images below.
Frans Floris, The last judgement, 1565. Vienna Museum, Picture Gallery. © KHM-Museumsverband
Georg Baselitz, Where to go, 2017. Munich, Wittelsbacher Ausgleichsfonds. © Georg Baselitz 2023, photo Jochen Littkemann, Berlin.
Titian and workshop, Diana and Callisto, California. 1566. Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, Picture Gallery. © KHM-Museumsverband
View of the exhibition “Baselitz: Naked Masters”. © KHM-Museumsverband
Georg Baselitz, nylon catwalk, 2022. Private collection. © Georg Baselitz 2023, photo: Jochen Littkemann, Berlin.
Lucas Cranach the Elder, The Fall: Adam, 1510/20. Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, Photo Gallery. © KHM-Museumsverband.
Georg Baselitz, Finger painting – Female nude, 1972. Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. © Georg Baselitz 2023, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, photo: Finn Brøndum.
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