Georg Baselitz’s Mausoleum of Dreams at White Cube
By Something CuratedGerman expressionist painter Georg Baselitz has transformed the White Cube in Bermondsey into a mausoleum of dreams with his solo exhibition, ‘Wir fahren aus (We’re off)’.
The ultra-modern space appears even more sublime under the influence of the artist’s 16 large-scale oil paintings and 2 massive bronze sculptures poised meditatively throughout its rooms. The sculptures are made from castings of rough and angular tree trunks, sliced down to an awkward and almost unrecognizable form, which are then cast in bronze and overlaid with black patina. The sculptures are both looming and fragile, laced with mystery and metamorphosis. Their peculiar materiality and clumsy shape causes them to appear to shift between wood, metal, and rubber as one walks around the room.
With a haunting yet incisive style comparable to the likes of fellow expressionist artists Egon Schiele, Edvard Munch, and Francis Bacon, Baselitz’s massive works suspend abject bodies against nebulous dark backdrops, veils of pink and white dust looming haphazardly between us and them. The figures float between the embryonic and old age – between life and death itself – somehow embodying both. As the prolific painter turns 80 this year, topics of mortality and existence become infused within his work, as the paintings float like ghosts across the gallery’s luminous polished concrete floors.
