IT’S walking into a room pregnant with portent – something ominous lingers unspoken between his giant canvases and monolithic sculptures. Georg Baselitz’s current show at New York City’s Gagosian Gallery 21st Street, Jumping Over My Shadow, conveys this looming, powerful feeling – perhaps well-described, appropriately, as the emotion a shadow may contain if it could.
The images – oil paint on canvas, and Indian ink pen and Indian ink on paper – are complete ethereality. Despite the heaviness, tonally, of the presentation, there’s an oxymoronic lightness to these headfirst, sinking statures. They’re self portraits in risen swaths of paint, texturised oil paint mounds elongated out as bodies’ lines, conveying a sort of buoyant, unencumbered free-fall. This same sepulchral helplessness grants the subjects fetus-like innocence, macabre injustice done to the nondescript body.
Perhaps Baselitz’s Jumping Over My Shadow is a commentary on the body policed, on the chalk outline stories and images regretfully received so superfluously by our newsfeeds. A shadow, a conceptual simulacrum of contemporary social states. “This idea of ’looking toward the future’ is nonsense,” Baselitz says. And thus here he nods, ostensibly, toward the here and now.
Georg Baselitz, Untitled, 2015 India ink pen and India ink on paper mounted on canvas, 130 5/16 × 58 7/16 inches (331 x 148.5 cm) © Georg Baselitz. Photograph: Jochen Littkemann, Berlin. Courtesy Gagosian.
Photograph: Rob McKeever. Courtesy Gagosian.