Georg Baselitz’s Fractured Figures Return to New York

Georg Baselitz’s new exhibition ‘Meine Schule’ opens at Gagosian’s West 24th Street gallery in New York this November, gathering recent sculptures that cement the German artist’s continuing dialogue with the human form in extremis. The show centres on Strawinsky, a monumental bronze cast from carved wood in which the figure’s architecture dissolves into eloquent disorder: the torso stands with stolid verticality while the head and limbs abandon themselves to collapse, each element speaking a different language of gravity and gesture.

Baselitz has long found expressive possibility in fragmentation. Here, the sculpture’s formal rupture becomes something more than formal, suggesting not merely the ravages of time but a kind of psychological unwinding. The work’s title connects it to the composer, yet the sculpture itself charts a private undoing, the body’s slow surrender to its own weight and the weight of history that presses upon it. Cast from components originally carved in wood, the bronze surfaces retain the quality of handwork, the marks of the artist’s engagement with material that preceded its metallic translation.

Richard Calvocoressi, curator of the exhibition, traces how Strawinsky embodies the tensions that animate Baselitz’s late practice: the collision between structural integrity and formal chaos, between the body as classical ideal and the body as vehicle for something rawer, more urgent. The surrounding works in ‘Meine Schule’ develop these preoccupations across differing scales and materials, each sculpture a discrete meditation on dismantlement and resilience.

The exhibition opens Thursday, November 12, from 6 to 8pm at Gagosian, 555 West 24th Street, New York. The video accompanying the show features Calvocoressi in conversation with the work itself, its casting process observed and its implications unfolded.

Imagery courtesy of Gagosian (@gagosian).