GEORG BASELITZ - Museo d`Arte Moderne, Lugano

GEORG BASELITZ (1938-)

Georg Baselitz is considered one of the most important and significant German contemporary artists and is the protagonist of a great retrospective hosted at the Museum of Modern Art in Lugano, for which this catalogue is published. He is a subversive artist, known for his upside-down motifs - a gesture which marks in an indelible way the process of image deconstruction - and he is part of the movement which, at the beginning of the eighties, through Transavanguardia in Italy, Neue Wilde in Germany and Figuration Libre in France, undertakes a new route in the field of figurative painting, as opposed to conceptual art and minimal art which had characterized the previous decade. This monograph of more than 100 works, including his paintings, wood sculptures and monumental engravings, spanning from Baselitz’s earliest years to the present day offers an unparalleled overview of his oeuvre, as well as insight into the subtle changes that have come to his work as he has matured. In recent years the distinctive visual universe that grew out of the artist’s study of art, myth and literature has expanded to make room for the personal, for memories of an upbringing in the German and Slavic cultural borderland, for everyday life and his family and for revisiting works by himself and others discussed in critical essays by Eric Darragon, Bruno Corà and Antonio Saura