‘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)
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’. In the lives of the two great German artists, the year 1938 forms an existential mirror point: year of Kirchner's death - year of Baselitz's birth. Art historian 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’.
From 2005, Baselitz created the so-called Remix series, in which retrospective research into his own work became an artistic concept. The large-format ‘Remix’ woodcuts shown in the exhibition with titles such as ‘The Shepherd’, ‘Painter in Coat - Two Boots’ or ‘Poet in Boots’ are thus all repetitions of the important series of heroic images that Baselitz created in the 1960s.
The gesture of repetition, which is inherent in the Remix series, 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. Using different artistic techniques and without hierarchical weighting, Baselitz and Kirchner utilised repetition as a method to create works with a high degree of independence and distinctiveness.
Analogue to the six remix woodcuts by Georg Baselitz, the exhibition brings together woodcuts by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, which repeatedly exist in his oeuvre in the form of paintings or in other techniques. On display are examples of works from all his creative years, such as the early works from the Brücke period ‘Blühende Bäume’ and ‘Liegender Akt’, 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 colour woodcut ‘Three Nudes in the Forest’, of which the 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 catalogue raisonné entitled ‘Emporsteigender’ (Gercken 1785), created shortly before Kirchner's death.
The exhibition curated by Patrick Urwyler on the upper floor of Galerie Henze & Ketterer in Wichtrach/Bern is accompanied by an online catalogue in which the works on display are juxtaposed with their corresponding paintings.
