"What was a real and directly experienced present or even future for Kirchner is the past for Baselitz. What has happened in the meantime weighs too heavily. Precisely because they were created using the same expressive method, these two artistic works show us their respective different sensitivities all the more vividly. In comparison, the incomparable becomes apparent." (Wolfgang Henze)
In the lives of the two great German artists, the year 1938 forms an existential mirror point: the year Kirchner died - the year Baselitz was born. Ingeborg Henze-Ketterer and Wolfgang Henze have pointed out that the lives and careers of the two are strangely mirrored, "in reverse order, upside down, so to speak."
Anselm Wagner also describes this incomparable pair as having “two faces”: “While Kirchner looks ahead, Baselitz, in the spirit of postmodernism, looks back to the wealth of art history in order to generate ever more images from existing ones.” In 1905, Kirchner andBrückecalled for the opposite—namely, the heightened expression of a new attitude toward life, “immediate and unadulterated,” in work corresponds work a euphoria of progress that has become completely alien to Baselitz and his generation. As mentioned at the outset, the events that have transpired since then weigh too heavily, and Baselitz’s works arise primarily from memory, reflection, and the reformulation of images from the past—always “expressive, but not expressionistic.” Consequently, the so-called “Remix” series emerged beginning in 2005, in which the retrospective exploration of his own body of work is declared an artistic concept and finds expression in drawings, prints, and paintings. The “Remix” woodcuts on display in our exhibition—with titles such as “The Shepherd,” “Painter in a Coat—Two Boots,” or “Poet in Boots”—are all reinterpretations of the significant heroic images that Baselitz created in the 1960s. Rhythmic and commanding, the six large-format woodcuts—Baselitz’s heroes—are distributed throughout the exhibition space, breaking up the works by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, which are hung in chronological order and offer a cross-section of his creative years.
Kirchner’s centrally hung woodcut “Die Freunde” not only approaches Baselitz’s format in terms of its dimensions; as the largest woodcut Kirchner ever created, it also references Baselitz’s heroes through its title: For both artists, these characteristic depictions of figures are an expression of an artistic aspiration to create autonomous works—and thereby to produce art that is of universal significance, endures beyond its time, and is not merely an episode. Both Kirchner and Baselitz work circle back to such central motifs in their work , engaging with them intensively across individual creative phases and over the course of decades. The accompanying gesture of repetition—which is also inherent in the “Remix” series and has always been close to Baselitz’s heart—is anything but foreign to Kirchner, who was born a good two generations earlier. This engagement with one’s own work also central to ELK’s practice, as evidenced by his reworkings and overpaintings of older works, redatings, photo retouching, as well as the art critiques he wrote himself about his work the pseudonym Louis de Marsalle. Time and again, work engagement with their own work finds expression in the direct and excessive elaboration of a motif. Using a variety of artistic techniques and without prioritizing any one over another, Baselitz and Kirchner employ repetition as a method to create works of great originality and distinctiveness. This results in heightened recognizability (the hallmark of every successful brand), a quality that both Kirchner and Baselitz—as major figures in the art of their time—can work for their work .
Analogous to the six Remix woodcuts by Georg Baselitz, the exhibition on the upper floor of the gallery brings together selected woodcuts by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, which always exist in his oeuvre as motifs in the form of paintings or in other techniques. On display are examples from all his creative years, such as the early works from the Brücke"Blühende Bäume" and "Liegender nude", as well as the prints "Stafelalp bei Mondschein" and "Lagernden Bauern", which were created in the Swiss years and whose version in oil on canvas is in the collection of the Kunstmuseum Bern. Also represented are works that represent Kirchner's "new style" of the late 1920s, such as "Pianist with Singer" and the outstanding color woodcut "Three nudes in the Forest", of which our gallery can also offer corresponding drawings and sketches. The exhibition concludes with the programmatic juxtaposition of Baselitz's remix "Maler im Mantel - zwei Stiefel" with the last woodcut in Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's catalog raisonné entitled "Emporsteigender", created shortly before Kirchner's death.
The exhibition curated by Patrick Urwyler on the upper floor of the Galerie Henze & Ketterer in Wichtrach/Bern is accompanied by an online catalogue in which the works on display are juxtaposed with their corresponding paintings.
