“Le Côté Sombre”: this is the title given to this exhibit dedicated to the artistic science of Georg Baselitz. Born January 23, 1938 in Deustchbaselitz, East Germany, he’s one of those special types that uses a chainsaw like a pencil. This is without a doubt how his bronzes acquire their strength. For over 10 years, he copied his own wood creations and reworked them in bronze. Black as coal or organic, Georg Baselitz’s silhouettes are still definitely made of bronze. Covering them in black patina allows him to tie things together with a more classic sculpture technique, used in the 16th and 17th centuries to protect Venetian bronzes.
These bronzes are like a synthesis of African art and German expressionism where, with a scythe, an axe, or a chainsaw, he brings out gigantic bodies that bear the traces of the blade that spawned them like scars. Arranged alone, in pairs, or in a group, these enormous statues feature the human anatomy through a lone deformed skeleton who’s head is a simple block with oval sides. A special breed of expression is taking up its rightful place within the immense Galerie Thaddaeus-Ropac in Pantin, Seine-Saint-Denis. Beneath the glass ceiling of what was once a boiler, the dark side of Georg Baselitz shall be revealed… until October 31st.
Le Côté sombre, Georg Baselitz.
Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac,
69, avenue du Général-Leclerc, Pantin, France
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