NARRATOR: 

Curator Gary Garrels. 

GARY GARRELS: 

Georg Baselitz began working in Berlin in the early 1960s. It’s hard to recall or remember at this point, how ravaged Germany had been by the Second World War. And the country—psychologically, spiritually, culturally—had been devastated. And this is context out of which Baselitz is creating his early work. He created this series of paintings of these large human forms in really desolated landscapes.  

The figures are distended, mottled, bruised. He called them heroes, because they were trying to, again, to assert a strength [inaudible voice or background noise] of German character, but coming out of this very bruised, devastated society.  

They’re very uneasy psychological kinds of situations in these pictures. Very brooding, a lot of darkness. And the relationship between the landscape and the figure is one where the figure feels very weighted, difficult. There’s no escaping.  

You’re really caught in the sort of existential kind of situation one can’t escape history.