Georg Baselitz

Georg Baselitz represented Germany at the Venice Biennale in 1980. The German born artist has worked in a variety of media throughout his career, and is one of the nation’s most established contemporary artists. His work has been celebrated in solo exhibitions and retrospectives at various art institutions world wide..

n 1992, Baselitz met the poet Robert Creeley in Derneberg, Germany. Creeley is one of America’s most prolific poets, having published more than sixty books of poetry and more than a dozen books of prose, essays, and interviews.

Their collaboration on the book Signs is a monument to both visual and literary international contemporary art worlds. Signs is a book of ten prints in drypoint and aquatint by Georg Baselitz and a prose poem by Robert Creeley. It is printed in an edition of sixty Arabic numbered books presented in folio on Somerset paper.

The prose reads:

You have never had a chance to speak of how particularly love mattered in your life, nor of the many ways it so invaded you, chafed, rubbed, itched, “grew wet with desire,” long, soft, hard, etc. You were observant of cares in such matters, bulks of person, legs, arms, heads, etc. It’s hard to budge the real if it’s not your own. Born very young into a world already very old… Even spitting it out was often awkward. Seemingly unseemly, uncertain. Curtain. Hide it from view, then, until they’ve all gone.

Images courtesy of Graphicstudio/USF