Georg Baselitz New Paintings 19 March – 24 April 1999         "What I see instantly arouses a memory of something I once saw, and it has turned into pictures, and meanwhile I see the pictures more and more sharply as models for pictures. The colored strokes and splotches and dots are already filled, occupied by the appropriate pictures, they are no longer free, can no longer be used in any other way, can no longer be formed anew. My entire kaleidoscopic system is gathered in a cardboard tube that I don't want to give away. I myself threw in all the multicoloured glass shards at some point. Earlier I broke open this cardboard tube and tried to fill in new and different variants. Then everything fell apart, and so the system has to be kept shut. The gathered stuff is seething and simmering and trying to get out." Georg Baselitz, 1994 For his first exhibition in London since 1994 Baselitz has created seven new paintings, each like a huge curtain, web or net suffused with light in which a single figure is captured. These are mostly female nudes formed like drawings from a few simple lines, which it seems at any moment could move, change or vanish like eddies or leaves on the surface of a river. In a 1987 lecture Baselitz spoke of the artist's need for longer arms to reach the picture behind the canvas, the next picture as yet unpainted, still floating in the web of his consciousness. These new images have just that sense of enticing elusiveness. Vintage Baselitz but with a new twist, lightness and delicacy, they link his most recent work inspired by antique Bohemian glass paintings (not yet seen in London) and the fragmentation, surface complexity and emblematic vocabulary we have come to know so well in the artist's past work. In pictures such as Daisies, Torso Woman, Towel and The Background, Baselitz demonstrates his life-long fascination with pattern and ornament in a new way. Traditional female nudes converge with a background of stylised flowers slipping in and out through the surface of the pictures like fish through waves. The unbroken links between the ancient world and that of the twentieth century have never been clearer, as Heinrich Heil suggests in his catalogue essay. In the book which accompanies this exhibition the Trustees of the Estate of Sylvia Plath have generously allowed us to juxtapose these images by Baselitz with seven complete poems by Sylvia Plath, who has inspired so many young artists of the post war period. Although the relationships between poems and pictures are entirely fortuitous, the connections which leap to eye and mind illuminate the work of both in an extraordinary way by allowing us to see each through the glass of the other. Currently Baselitz also has a retrospective exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. He has recently completed a group of paintings for the new Reichstag building in Berlin.