Executed in 1964, the present work on paper by Georg Baselitz depicts an amorphic and surreal landscape. Painted in flashes of unearthly reds, oranges and yellows, the present work is a classic example from Baselitz’s Pandemonium period. As the earliest phase of his mature career that spans the years 1961-64, the pandemoniac works feature provocative and nightmarish corporeal forms set within an apocalyptic realm.

During the early 1960s Baselitz immersed himself in Hans Prinzhorn’s influential and richly illustrated book ‘The Art of the Mentally Ill’ (1922), a text that had already become a key point of reference for Jean Dubuffet in his development of Art Brut during the late 1940s. As elucidated by Prinzhorn, art-making performed a cathartic function for patients of mental illness, and in this Baselitz saw a potential solution for processing the wider pscho-social trauma of the post-war era. The philosophical dimension of Baselitz’s ambitions was expressed through the Pandämonisches Manifest ('Pandemonium Manifesto') that he authored with Eugen Schönebeck in 1961 and 1962. These treatises consisted of typed and handwritten text accompanied by chaotic and apocalyptic drawings, and interrogated the limits of paranoia: "the discharges of the flesh, the sexual fantasticality... Pandemonic entrenchment that leaves no more hope" (Georg Baselitz and Eugen Schönebeck, Pandämonisches Manifest II, Spring 1962). For Baselitz, as art historian Schulamith Behr has outlined, wider artistic and social renewal was dependent on “a charged combination of infantile regression and aggressive provocation. Creative self-ethnology involved an embrace of estranged identities: the asocial, the insane, the deviant and the amoral; categories deemed ‘degenerate’ during the Third Reich” (Shulamith Behr, in: Exh. Cat., London, Royal Academy of the Arts, Georg Baselitz, 2007, p. 51).

Towards the end of the Pandomium phase and following the infamous exhibition of Die Grosse Nacht em Eimer (Big Night Down the Drain) in 1963, Baselitz began producing the Idol paintings before his transition into the Hero or New Type portraits of 1964 and 1965. At the crossroads between these two bodies of work, Untitled hints at the wounded landscapes that occupy the Hero paintings as well as the hallucinatory and iconic forms of the Idols.