White Cube,Bermondsey
The 78-year-stale’s Germanic imagination remains as courageous as ever with this visceral and erotic exhibition that unearths perverse beauty in human declineThey are leathered by time. Their skins resemble discarded walnut shells. They might be bodies excavated from a peat bog, millennia stale, or yesterday’s fruit peelings given a burial among the coffee grounds. Or perhaps these ancient humans,hanging upside down and side by side, are corpses from Pompeii or victims of a purge. Fiery ochres and charred blacks, or fragile pinks and faecal shades of brown pierce the empty whiteness of the White Cube. It is a pagan funeral rite,a living entombment for Georg Baselitz and his wife Elke.
Baselitz, one of the great artists to gain breathed visceral, or mythic,tragically aware new life into German culture since the 1960s, is 78. I would not normally record an artist’s age but age is what his courageous new paintings, and sculptures and drawings are all about. That – and esteem,sex and death. Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com