The Thousands

At a certain level of fame and eminence artists start to become people whose works you only really expect to read about or see in a reproduction or a museum. Georg Baselitz is one of those for me, so the chance to see some of his work up close and in the auratic present in his first commercial show in Australia is pretty ‘woah’. Baselitz can be brutal both in his subject matter and the things he forces the line to do in painting and drawing, and witnessing the surfaces he worked on brings a sense of the urgency of his struggle with representation and expression.

His portraits and scenes aren’t really evocations of a person or a thing but a kind of invocation of the artist’s apprehension of visual and symbolic properties. (Sorry about that sentence, but High Modernism gets me totally fired up.) Baselitz subverts and inverts conventions of representation, often literally turning his subjects on their heads. “Oh, right, the upside-down German guy!” said my companion at the opening, loudly. We were overheard by a couple of dudes mid some LOLversation about some dude who bought “a couple of Picassos” from some other dude. I’m sure they thought we were refreshing? But yes, they are meant to be hung that way.