Georg Baselitz: Sculptures 2011-2015
Serpentine Gallery, London, UK
5 October 2023 – 7 January 2024
The Serpentine South gallery currently showcases German artist Georg Baselitz’s work, available for viewing until tomorrow. Hurry to discover some of his latest pieces – created between 2011 and 2015 – reflecting on history, personal life, and childhood memories, modeled on himself and his wife Elke.
The visit felt to me like a visit to the artist’s studio, especially if you know that the ten timber sculptures in this art exhibition were not originally intended for public view. They were made as models, in preparation for bronze works. Each wooden sculpture is made from a single tree trunk, which Baselitz carved down using power saws, axes, and chisels. His solid, impactful figures retain the texture of timber, with distinctive incisions and notches across their surfaces.
Surrounded by the trees of Kensington Gardens, the venue complements the sculptures, evoking their original living forms in the forests of Saxony. The exhibition invites you into a forest of raw, timber sculptures, offering insights into Baselitz’s process and highlighting connections between his drawings and sculptures across different mediums. The accompanying drawings are not preparatory sketches but were created during the sculpting process.
There’s enough space within the gallery for visitors to walk freely around the huge artworks and engage with the performative side of sculpture, as we enjoyed doing, and you can see in the photos below. One of the most memorable works in this exhibition is “Zero Mobil”, a big timber sculpture suspended from the ceiling with a skull motif exploring themes of time, mortality, and the fragility of life.
Georg Baselitz (b. 1938, Saxony, Germany) first came to prominence in post-war Germany as a painter. From 1969 onwards, he has been known for turning upside down human forms and other motifs in an attempt to disrupt pictorial conventions. Turning figures upside down also invites abstraction and offers a fresh perspective on the world.
With a career spanning over six decades, Baselitz is one of the most prolific artists of his generation. He has also been one of the most controversial, with his early background fundamental to understanding his artwork. Born Hans-Georg Kern in Deutschbaselitz in 1938 in what later became East Germany (in 1958, he fashioned his name after his birthplace), the young Baselitz grew up in the immediate aftermath of World War II. According to the curator of the exhibition, Tamsin Hong, Baselitz doesn’t want to forget memories even if they are challenging.
Baselitz focused on form, color, and texture, bringing new perspectives to the tradition of German Expressionism. He turned to sculpture in 1979, continuing to explore tensions between the figurative and the abstract through crude approximations of figures and body parts carved from wood. Baselitz says of his creations: “My carvings are best described by Immanuel Kant: ‘Out of the crooked wood of humanity, nothing entirely straight can be built. It is only the approximation of this idea that nature imposes upon us.’”
Entering the South Serpentine gallery with this exhibition on display was like entering the artist’s studio and discovering the intricacies of his thought and creative process. The somehow primal shape of these huge sculptures, and the smell of the wood and the knowledge of being surrounded by trees outside the gallery contributes to make the experience grounded and authentic.
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