Are there any limits to art’s ability to transform? Not according to Georg Baselitz, the veteran German artist who has reworked the imagery from a set of 19th-century “erotic lithographs” that many might describe as pornography. For starters, he flips the pictures upside down – his habitual way of inverting reality. But that’s just the beginning. Baselitz unleashes a joyous arsenal of artistic ingenuity on these crude images of a couple making love, bringing both immense technical skill and witty conceptual brilliance to pictures that, through his eyes, become oddly moving.
This year Baselitz turned 85 and his birthday is being celebrated with exhibitions all over the world, from a show of his rough-hewn wooden sculptures at London’s Serpentine to new paintings of shamanistic half-stag, half-human figures that’s just opened in New York. He also took over Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum to celebrate its paintings of nudes. But if you still need converting to this unique artist’s humour and intensity (he proves they can go together), this provocative little show might be the best introduction of all.
