"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 calls the incomparable pair Janus-faced: "While Kirchner looks forward, Baselitz looks back to the fund of art history in the spirit of postmodernism in order to generate ever more images from pictures". In 1905, Kirchner and "Brücke" demanded the opposite, namely to express the heightened expression of a new attitude to life "directly and unadulterated" in his work, which corresponds to a euphoria of progress that Baselitz and his generation had become completely alien to. As mentioned at the beginning, what had happened in the meantime weighed too heavily and Baselitz's works were created primarily in the memory, reflection and reformulation of images from the past - always "expressive, but not expressionist". Consequently, from 2005 onwards, the so-called Remix series was created, in which the retrospective research of his own work is declared an artistic concept and finds expression in drawings, prints and paintings. The "Remix" woodcuts shown in our exhibition with titles such as "The Shepherd", "Painter in Coat - Two Boots" or "Poet in Boots" are all repetitions of the important heroic images that Baselitz created in the 1960s. The total of six large-format woodcuts, Baselitz's heroes, are distributed rhythmically and with a strong presence in the exhibition space and break up the works by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, which are hung in chronological order and show a cross-section of his creative years.
Kirchner's centrally hung woodcut "The Friends" not only approaches Baselitz's format through its dimensions, the largest woodcut ever created by Kirchner also relates to Baselitz's heroes through its title: in both artists, the significant depictions of figures are an expression of an artistic aspiration to create autonomous works and thus to enable art that is of general significance and endures beyond its time and is not just an episode. Kirchner and Baselitz repeatedly revolve around such central motifs in their work and deal with them intensively over individual work phases and decades. The associated gesture of repetition, which is also present in the Remix series and has always been close to Baselitz, is anything but alien to Kirchner - born a good two generations earlier. The examination of his own work is also a concept in ELK's work, as evidenced by his reworkings and overpaintings of older works, re-dating, photo retouching, but also his self-written art criticism of his work under the pseudonym Louis de Marsalle. Again and again, both artists' examination of their own work is reflected in the direct and excessive treatment of a motif. Using different artistic techniques and without hierarchical weighting, Baselitz and Kirchner use repetition as a method to create works with a high degree of independence and distinctiveness. This results in increased recognition (the quality feature of every successful brand), which both Kirchner and Baselitz can claim for their work as important protagonists of the art of their time.
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 Mondlicht" 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.
