“Everything is a self‐portrait, whether it's a tree or a nude… It's how the artist sees it … Everything that you see is a reflection of yourself."
Fingermalerei - Akt (Finger Painting – Nude) is an exceptional example of Georg Baselitz's seminal early corpus of upside-down self-portraits, which rank among his most significant and influential bodies of work. Starting in 1972, Baselitz produced a radically intimate, bold and conceptually rigorous series of portraits rendered with his own fingertips, assiduously challenging the conventions of art history and representation in order to deliver a searing analysis of the human condition. Imbued with Baselitz's distinctive artistic vernacular and raw, renegade energy, Fingermalerei - Akt presents the artist's own body painted with his own body. Test.mes nt to the enduring strength of this series, Fingermalerei - Akt first debuted at the Kunsthalle Bern alongside Fingermalerei-Schwarzer Akt (1973), now housed in the Kunsthalle Kiel, and Fingermalerei-Akt (1972) which is in the collects ion of the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Bearing remarkable provenance and exhibition history, the present work was acquired by the Essl collects ion in June 1997, where it was exhibited numerous t.mes s at the Essl Museum and across a series of traveling exhibitions before being purchased by Connie Caplan a decade ago, and subsequently donated to the Phillips collects ion.
Distinguished by its defiant, frontal perspective and startling impact, Fingermalerei – Akt depicts Baselitz's most significant subject: the self. Baselitz flexes and contorts his physique with simultaneous vulnerability and bravura, foregoing the brush in favor of his own fingers. As Michael Auping describes, "By using his fingers to depict his own naked body, Baselitz was also making a bold stat.mes nt about his own physical materiality. As the artist has described, 'when you are painting a figure you are not thinking about a story, you are thinking about the body, what it can do and how you can experience through paint. You paint using your own body, and that is part of how you identify with your subject, a form of empathy." (Michael Auping in: Exh. Cat., Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Georg Baselitz: Portraits of Elke, 1997‐1999, p. 15)
“Taken as a whole, the works of the early 1970s are marked by what is, for Baselitz, a surprisingly open layout. There are two immediate reasons for this. He is, firstly, experimenting with the possibilities of a new technique, namely finger painting: and, secondly the deliberately light, bright coloring he uses in these compositions favors an impression of transparency… This textual openness has its counterpart in Baselitz’s choice of subjects… Whether the subject is birds - suggested by a friend’s collects ion of photographs - or undergrowth, corpses, interiors, eagles, eagles’ wings, or, finally, a long series of nudes, he always succeeds in focusing attention on the brilliant subtlety of the application of the paint itself.”
Since 1969, Baselitz has sought to "liberate representation from content," inverting his image to prompt the viewer to see the picture as a painted surface rather than an illusionistic space of representational subject matter. (The artist quoted in: Exh. Cat., New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Georg Baselitz, 1995, p. 71) By the early 1970s, Baselitz perfected his sophisticated approach to manipulating pictorial structures that accentuated the expressive qualities of his compositions, primarily through his fingerpainting technique and the light, bright hues in these compositions, which create a dreamlike, otherworldly impression. Liberating style from subject, the present work typifies this disruptive mode of depiction, allowing the artist to oscillate between and synthesize figuration and abstraction. Becoming more than a self-portrait, Fingermalerei – Akt redefines and questions the dichotomies between abstraction and figuration, probings the liminal space between the two. The figure's upside-down portrayal instills a sense of disorientation in the composition, forcing the viewer to mentally invert the image to make sense of it. Through the unprimed edges of the canvas, drawing further attention to the medium itself, the tactile, impastoed surface of paint, inverted composition and art historically entrenched subject of portraiture, Baselitz explores the conventions of artistic production whilst simultaneously interrogating and destabilizing its techniques.
Georg Baselitz Self-Portraits in Institutional collects ions
In the present work, Baselitz challenges traditional conventions of artmaking, employing his own fingers to paint with a fervent almost violent force, to provide a profound commentary on how a generation of German artists might explore issues of art, national identity, and representations of the self in the wake of the Second World War. Akin to Edvard Munch's late Self-Portrait Between the Clock and the Bed (1943) and Lucian Freud's Painter Working, Reflection (1993), Baselitz portrays himself, meeting the viewer's gaze with a jarring intensity. Replete with sheer mastery of a groundbreaking painterly style, Baselitz's unique ideology and artistic lexicon, Fingermalerei – Akt deservedly belongs among the painter's most dramatic and ambitious works.
Georg Baselitz: Only in Art the World is Whole
