Georg Baselitz (Special Edition)

Richard Calvocoressi

£1,000.00

A special limited edition of Georg Baselitz’s authorized monograph, featuring a presentation portfolio containing a limited edition folded print created by master printers Borch Editions. The print, Zeichen, is signed and numbered by the artist.

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Overview

A prolific artist with a protean output, Georg Baselitz has rethought the conventions of a range of media, predominantly painting and sculpture, over the course of a career of some sixty years. Born in 1938, Baselitz was expelled from art school in East Berlin in 1956 for ‘socio-political immaturity’, and moved to the western half of the city. By the late 1950s, he had rejected the dominant tendencies of both sides of the country and his singular achievement was to reintroduce the figure, compromised and discredited though it was by both Nazism and Communism, into art. By drawing attention to art by ‘outsiders’, such as psychiatric patients, and invoking a Parisian model of existentialist art and literature, Baselitz proposed an alternative European tradition that did not eliminate the human subject.

In alluding later to movements in German painting such as Expressionism as well as to artists like Munch, he also consciously rehabilitated the kind of art that was condemned by Hitler as ‘degenerate’. The book follows the development of Baselitz’s unique style from his earliest work through to the most recent creations of his eighth decade. Calvocoressi’s masterful construction of a chronological narrative helps us to evaluate Baselitz’s work in terms of the disruptions of his life – historical upheavals witnessed alongside an astonishing career.

This special limited edition features:

• A copy of the book Georg Baselitz
• A presentation portfolio housing a limited edition folded print, Zeichen ‘Signs’ (2021), printed on Kozo 25g /m2 paper, and measuring 58 x 46 cm. It has been signed and numbered by the artist himself.
• Zeichen is printed by Borch Editions, one of the world’s leading producers and publishers of fine art prints.
• Limited to 100 copies numbered 1–100.

Product Information

Book Details

Format: Hardback (no jacket) in slipcase

Edition Type: Special edition

Size: 30.8 x 24.0 cm

Extent: 392 pp

Illustrations: 406

Publication date: 19 August 2021

ISBN: 9780500094396

About the Author

Richard Calvocoressi is currently a director at Gagosian Gallery, and is a former Director of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. He wrote the catalogue text for Baselitz’s first exhibition in a commercial gallery in London, and in 1983 was author of the main catalogue essay for his first retrospective in Britain at the Whitechapel Gallery. As curator responsible for German art at Tate, Calvocoressi was instrumental in the acquisition of his works for the UK national collection.