Serpentine, 2022
Edition of 100 in blue and green (50 prints of each colour)
Numbered, signed and dated by the artist
Plate Size: 33.1 x 24.7 cm
Paper Size 53 x 39 cm
Technique: Etching with sugar lift aquatint on Somerset White Satin 300 gsm.
This limited edition, available in blue and green, is released on the occasion of Georg Baselitz: Sculptures 2011-2015 at Serpentine. Typical of the artist’s painting and print practice, it features an inverted human figure – a strategy he has employed since the 1960s to focus on the possibilities of visual expression. It also depicts his most enduring subject: his wife Elke. He met Elke Kretzschmar in 1958 while they were both students and over the course of his six-decade career, returns to her inverted form regularly. Ruminating on the futility of removing subject matter altogether, Baselitz reflects ‘I don’t illustrate Elke. If anything, I try to remove her, but I usually can’t. She comes into the process whether I want it or not, through the back of my mind.’
Georg Baselitz (b. 1938, Saxony, Germany) first came to prominence in 1960s Germany as a painter. From 1969 onwards, he has been known for inverting – or turning upside down – human forms and other motifs within expressionistic paintings which attempt to move away from content and narrative. Baselitz instead focussed on form, colour and texture, bringing new perspectives to the tradition of figurative painting. He turned to sculpture from 1979, continuing to explore tensions between the figurative and the abstract through crude approximations of figures and body parts carved from wood.
© Photo: readsreads.info
