Busting out Baselitz (2024)

A dense field of gestural strokes in black, silver-grey, white and gold, worked with the raw, urgent physicality that gives the painting its name. Georg Baselitz's presence is felt not in imitation but in attitude: the same refusal of easy resolution, the same insistence that a mark can carry feeling before it carries form. Layers of scumbled grey and white build a scaffolding across the canvas, interrupted by passages of gold that surface like memory pushing through — warm, buried light glimpsed between the slashes of black. Where Baselitz famously inverted the figure to strip it of narrative and force attention onto paint itself, this canvas works by a related logic of disruption: gesture is piled on gesture until any legible image dissolves, leaving only the record of the hand's movement — decisive, unresting, occasionally violent. The black strokes at the base gather weight and gravity, anchoring the composition, while the upper register stays open and unresolved, gold and white skittering across in short, broken passes. The result sits between control and abandon: a surface that looks spontaneous but is built from repeated return and revision, each layer both covering and revealing the one beneath it — a painting that busts its way out from underneath its own history, much as Baselitz's work bust its way out from under the weight of painterly convention.