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closed George Baselitz.

The show

It is a sequence of paintings divided into two themes dedicated to his wife Elke Baselitz and to Emilio Vedova.
Each series is clearly recognizable as such due to the coherence of the stylistic motif and is also characterized by the chosen words and playful ideas, the Witz, with which the artist constructs the titles.
The canvases, all of the same large size (300x212 cm) with vertical development, mark the white walls built specifically inside the Magazzino del Sale, creating a rigorous and rhythmic installation.
The seven canvases dedicated to Vedova are mostly monochrome, and the titles offer the public an opportunity to grasp some details about the relationship between the artist and his longtime friend Emilio Vedova.
Speaking of this friendship, Fabrizio Gazzarri, director of the archive and collection of the Fondazione Vedova, remembers precisely how Vedova introduced Baselitz to him: "Emilio Vedova was smiling [...] intent on leafing through the catalog of a German gallery with which he worked, the same as his dear friend Georg Baselitz, known during the years of his stay in Berlin, around 1963. His attention stopped on the image of an upturned eagle, painted with aggressive and material brushstrokes that expressed all the power and charm of this mythical bird of prey of the skies, lucid and very attentive to the things of the earth. Emilio told me, pleased, that the author of that painting was a friend of his, a great painter ».
There are ten canvases dedicated to his wife and to the Speiseeis (Gelato) and Philip Rylands describes them as follows: «The dense magma of the pigment, of the matière, the main characteristic of Baselitz's most expressionist paintings, has dissolved. […] They are poetic and cheerful works ».
The ice cream paintings, also available in different flavors, are images of the woman the artist has been married to for more than sixty years and the first portrait dedicated to her dates back to 1969. About his muse, Baselitz himself writes: " I do not illustrate Elke. If I ever try to remove it, I usually can't. She re-enters the process, whether I like it or not, comes back from a hidden part of my mind. Neutrality is a myth, but you can't give up the fight. To create something new you have to fight the conventions of the genre and the subject itself. The purpose of portraiture is to leave the portrait behind so that we can move forward. "

Gallery

Works on display

Timetable and tickets

Address

Dorsoduro, 50
30123 Venice

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Photographic notes

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