GEORG BASELITZ @ The Bilbao Fine Arts Museum

Born in 1938 as Hans-Georg Kern, Baselitz took his pseudonym from the city where he was born, Deutschbaselitz (Saxony, Germany). He is one of the most influential painters in the second half of the twentieth century. In the 1960s, he became known for his large-scale, clearly expressionist figurative paintings which are identified with the generation that questioned the values unleashed by the Second World War.

Located in the 1970 building’s main gallery, the exhibition will present around fifty paintings created in the past decade and chosen by the historian Norman Rosenthal. These impressive works (some measure as large as 480 x 300 cm) address Baselitz’s thematic obsessions in extraordinary images permeated with the persistence of bodily awareness, autobiography and art history. Figures, hands, silk stockings, legs, feet and imperial eagles embody a new expressiveness and the brilliant lucidity of the German artist’s most recent output.

The show also examines the idea that creative power overcomes the severest physical limitations in Baselitz’s late style, which makes it part of an artistic genealogy of resistance whose sacred mountain is also occupied by other artists with long lives, like Titian, Rembrandt, Goya and Picasso.

The BBKmuseoa programme will use this artistic example to suggest to the public a reflection on active ageing and the current challenge of intergenerationality.