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On Japanese paper primed in different colours. Printed at Atelier Till Varclas, Hamburg, edtion no. 4/12. signed. 99.8 x 50 cm on 124 x 70 cm. Numbered in pencil lower left. Signed and dated in pencil lower right.
Taking up the meaning of the word “remix” as “remixing” or “recombination,” Baselitz establishes references to his older works of the 50s and ’60s by artistically revisiting motifs from that time. However, the transfer of pictorial subjects from the past and the medium of painting into the present and into printmaking is not an “imitation,” but a new form, a new pictorial language that is due to the artist’s changed life situation.
In the mid-1960s Baselitz was intensively concerned with the type of the “hero”. Strangely isolated, overpoweringly large appearing male figures in brown, red, black and white, whose powerful physique is satirized by small heads, posing in front of destroyed landscapes. An ambivalent viewing moment, as the static-passive posture of these heroes, as well as their open pants, reveal more vulnerability and satire than heroic fighting spirit. In the new edition “65′ (Remix)” Baselitz takes up this topos again, but revives it in a far more reduced form than the painterly results created at the height of the Cold War: In the woodcut some 40 years later, sharply outlined body contours meet a black background, the figures are largely abstracted and stand alone, and thus amplified in their sole effect.
