Graphic Arts

Georg Baselitz
Arnulf Rainer

Georg Baselitz and Arnulf Rainer have mastered the graphic arts in a virtuoso manner.

The tracing of forms in Baselitz’s work and the process of transformation and agglomeration in Rainer’s oeuvre give graphic arts both an integral and independent meaning in relation to the artists’ entire output.

For both artists it is a medium that allows them to get to the core of their creative ideas. These works encompass the concentrated strength and aggression of essential form-finding.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue.

GEORG BASELITZ

If something has changed in my work on paintings and sculptures and drawings or if I’ve had a new idea, my main goal is to use it and execute it in a graphic technique as a correction, a clarification, an exclamation point.

Georg Baselitz in a conversation with Ulrich Weisner, 1989

ARNULF RAINER

Similar to the principle I follow in my overpainting, my etchings are created using other plates, but mostly my own. The gradual covering takes place slowly over several years. In the many intermediate stages, only individual test prints are made. If I think that I’ve found a firm foundation, I decide to produce an edition. So these plates have gone through many stages (although you would hardly be able to tell that when comparing them), just like human beings and insects in their metamorphoses. The drypoint technique allows the slow growth of a work, and thus it becomes increasingly important in my graphic work. It is likely that one day all my plates will end up to be black, that is, completely scratched out. Getting there represents a long path, on which I daily struggle along, because I love being on the road rather than reaching the destination, and I want to skip absolutely nothing along the way.

From the introductory text on the Stirnstrandwand portfolio, 1970