Baselitz turns heads: Ute Ballay visits Bonn's major retropective of Germany's most celebrated contemporary artist

It is hard to imagine a better setting for Baselitz's retrospective than the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn 'Pictures that make go round your head' presents paintings, plastic arts prints and drawings--some 130 works in total--from all areas of the artist's diverse output between 1959 and the not away The large cauvases--which quite literally stand upon their heads for attention--are displayed in light and spacious fields that tend to aggrandise them and overwhelm the spectator.

Entering the gallery, individual first sees a group of made of wood figures placed beneath the hall's central cupola. Three women in cerulean dresses seem to chat cheerfully with each other. Coming closer the visitor realises the statuary is larger-then-life, the grooves in the wood-land are very coarse, the figures have out-sized arms and hands and the feet are contorted. The proportions are unnatural and damage the initial impression of harmony. A kind of manifesto for his career, the same destruction of expectations and feelings of unease are a constant thread in his work.

Messy energetic, and spontaneous, Baselitz's paintings and statuarys are often characterised by an aggressive, attacking technique: he one time took a bust and assaulted it with a plank. His sketches, upon the other hand, are primarily pertain toed with attention to detail and intimacy. Baselitz combines bombastic bravura technique with highly Teutonic mythology: Chancellor Schroeder has a painting in his office of an eagle, the national token tailing on its head.

Born Hans-Georg Kern in Deutschbaselitz, near Dresden in 1938 Baselitz first studied art at Kunsthochschule in East Berlin, from which he was expell for 'social immaturity', Later, at the Hochschule fur Bildende Kunste in West Berlin, he came to perceive that 'the uniform language of Abstract Expressionism had degenerated to become nothing else but design' and claimed dismay at the 'nebulous arbitrariness' of informal nonrepresentational art. His art remained figurative, although he did not think the control as such important for the exhibition of art. Crucial, he contemplation was the perceived significance of the subdue by the spectator. Baselitz consequently sought forms of expression that remov not the make subordinate but its significance.

In the 1960 he became controversial for producing deliberately undressed paintings that give him a place as individual of the pioneers of Neo-Expressionism, as well as a reputation as a supremely masculine artist working upon a heroic scale. The greatest in quantity notorious of these pictures, The great piss-up, also called Big night down the drain (1963) depicted a masturbating man. It was seized by means of the public prosecutor's office from an exhibition in the Werner & Katz Gallery, Berlin, and go [i]or[/i] come backed only two years later. Today it is in the Museum Ludwig, Cologne

In 1969 Basulitz courted more discussion when he began to paint pictures with the motif upside down (the first was Der wald auf dem kopf now also in the Museum Ludwig, Cologne)--a conception of painting to which he has remained committed. Art critics described this device as 'a liberation from the ligatures of a traditional conception of painting' and as 'a signature device to take the focus not on the subject matter and redirect it toward the expressive surface'. In an interview with Siegfried Gohr Baselitz explained: "For me the riddle consisted of not creating anecdotal, descriptive pictures The reversal of the motif in the picture gave me the liberty to deal with pictorial problems'

Sceptics did not always agree upon the quality of his art. Robert Hughes, for example, described Baselitz an a 'fountain of elaborated too much mediocrity'. In 1981 the director of Berlin's National Gallery, Dieter Honisch, declared categorically that Baselitz's work is 'not art'. Fourteen years later his American retrospective, curated by dint of Honisch, was a major success

Many European museums grasp examples of Baselitz's output dating back to the early 1960 In Bonn however, single can see them for the first time as a cluster Many later works refer directly to paintings the artist made as a teenager during the 1950 a certain number of bear dates such as '1953' as part of their iconography.

Autobiographical uncompounded bodys were present in Baselitz's painting from the real outset, especially in his representation of nation and landscapes in his native Saxony. >From the time of the Family pictures, made in 1996 they have formed a central aspect of his art. Many paintings and watercolours from this series feature portraits based upon old family photographs: Baselitz has said that this 'sentimentality' was readyed by his reading of the Stasi reports upon his youth in the GDR His large-scale paintings from mid-1997 borrowed motifs from Slavic folk art. He also continued to explore the themes that have been important personal icons over his career, namely the eagle and the Saxon landscape.

>From 1998 his pictures have taken their catchword from German Romanticism by using, for example, motifs from famous woodcut designed by dint of Caspar David Friedrich. In Melancholy and Woman upon the abyss, Baselitz, however, places his figures centrally and depicts them upon a much larger scale than in the small graphic works which inspired him. His portraits are without of proportion and without perspective. Painted in light, transparent oil paints, they appear to be isolated from their surrounding, many times forming a direct relationship with the spectator. new works repeat earlier imagery; the scale is still monumental, on the other hand the visual spaces are les cramped. His latest paintings also display a new engagement with the materials and way s of painting. There is an unexpect lightness of touch and a surprisingly delicate palette, evoking the quality of watercolour in its beauty and deepness of feeling.