Georg Baselitz's Intimate Sculpture

In the 60s and 70s of the twentieth century Georg Baselitz became famous for his expressionist and provocative painting, for subjects and themes that knew how to upset common morality and arouse the morbid interest of the public. In 60 years of practice, Baselitz's art has evolved along various lines and for example the German artist found inspiration in African sculpture, which he said offered a model for a more spontaneous expression of human movement and emotion. A path that will lead him to exhibit his first sculpture, Modell Für Eine Skulptur, at the German pavilion of the Venice Biennale in 1980, sparking a noisy controversy. It wasn't so much the subject, which as in other cases seems to critically recall the figure of Adolf Hitler, that was shocking. The public expected more, they expected his usual pictorial works. But for Baselitz the sculptures are “more primitive, more brutal, not as tame as painting can sometimes be.” Today, more than 40 years later, this exhibition at the Serpentine South presents the preparatory models in wood and the sketches of sculptural projects that the artist would have liked to create in bronze and which he has not yet completed. Each wood sculpture is made from a single tree trunk, which Baselitz carved using power saws, axes and chisels. His solid and impactful figures retain the texture of the wood, with distinctive engravings and notches on their surfaces and recall their original life forms in the forests of Saxony highlighting, where necessary, the impossible difference between the different forms - painting, drawing, sculpture - in which art is expressed.