Georg Baselitz

Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner in circa 1994

Esslingen, Villa Merkel; Galerie der Stadt Esslingen; and Florence, Villa Romana, 30 Preisträger und Künstlergäste der letzten 30 Jahre, 1988, p. 35, illustrated in colour 

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate although the overall tonality is brighter and more vibrant in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Extremely close inspection reveals a minute loss to the impastoed peak to the bottom of black eye of the left deer. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultra-violet light.
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Renowned for a defiance of traditional artistic tendencies, Georg Baselitz is an artist who extols an utterly inimitable pictorial language: the upside-down depiction of figurative subjects has become a hallmark of his production since 1969. Executed in 1984, Zwei Rehe is a lyrically vibrant example of Baselitz’s celebrated pictorial strategy.

Zwei Rehe depicts an inverted motif of two deers touching at their nose; their simplified and inverted forms appear to dissolve in a thickly painted and brightly coloured background. Allegedly fragmented, circularly painted smudges of maroon, turquoise, yellow, purple and orange are chaotically allocated to imbue the painting with rhythmic tension. This semi-abstracted colourful whirlpool endows the painting with a unifying balance while the vast vibrant forms of the deer cluster in the centre of the canvas. Herein, Zwei Rehe reveals a sophisticated interplay of expressionistic colour and motif in which abstraction unfolds into figuration.

Georg Baselitz started to paint upside-down depictions of people, nature and animals in 1969, craving to detach a literal interpretation from the painted image: “If you stop fabricating motifs but still want to carry on painting, then inverting the motif is the obvious thing to do. The hierarchy which has the sky at the top and the earth at the bottom is, in any case, only a convention. We have got used to it, but we don’t have to believe in it… What I wanted was quite simply to find a way of making pictures, perhaps with a new sense of detachment” (Georg Baselitz in conversation with Peter Moritz Pickshaus, 1990 in: Franz Dahlem, Georg Baselitz, Cologne 1990, p. 29). In Zwei Rehe this sense of detachment is accentuated by the artist’s use of psychedelic colour to undermine semiotic reference and deviate from the natural subject of the deer – a traditional iconographic facet within German visual culture prevalent in works of art stemming back to Lucas Cranach the Elder and Albrecht Dürer, right through to Franz Marc and his heroism of the natural world and unification of animal and landscape during the early twentieth century.

In relation to the latter, Baselitz’s painting reignites an early Twentieth Century impetus in German art of returning ‘back-to-nature’. For example, Marc’s all-over organisation of the pictorial field in his 1913 masterpiece, Deer in the Forest, in the Phillips Collection, Washington D.C., makes for an intriguing comparison to the present work. Both pictures share an all-over integration of background and foreground, wildlife and its surroundings, and reality as translated into unbridled colour and inchoate line. However, where Marc was driven by a holistic vision of the world as an interconnected system of line, colour and energy, Baselitz takes on this aesthetic in terms of an abstract quotation and literally turns it on its head. In doing so, Baselitz releases his works from the symbolic immediacy of nature as championed by Marc. “By never following stylistic trends, but stubbornly defying every successive manifestation of fashion, the artist has attained a degree of authenticity that makes his work an exemplary contribution to contemporary art... Expressiveness, insofar as it ever comes to the fore in his work, is only a means to the resolution of pictorial problems, never an end in itself; there is no room for facile effects” (Andreas Franzke, George Baselitz, Munich 1989, p. 13). Indeed, by rejecting the contemporaneous inquiries of Conceptual art, Minimalism and Pop art, Baselitz revived a form of German Expressionism which impacted greatly upon the formation of the Neue-Wilden group in Germany during the later 1980s.