Windrad (Remix) [Windmill (Remix)]

‘If you’re remixing popular music you change the rhythm or the sound…What I do is something entirely different. I have thought for a long time about what to call what I do. I liked the word ‘remix’ because it comes from youth culture.’
–Georg Baselitz

‘The hierarchy which has located the sky at the top and the earth at the bottom is, in any case, only a convention. We have got used to it but we don’t have to believe in it. The only thing that interests me is the question of how I can carry on painting these pictures’
–Georg Baselitz

Executed in 2006, Windrad (Remix) [Windmill (Remix)] comes from Georg Baselitz’s critically acclaimed Remix series, in which the artist generated a new body of work based on his eminent paintings from the 1960s. In revisiting and re-envisaging his earlier oeuvre, Baselitz sought to readdress an elapsed and fading past by reflecting on an ever-changing present. Viewing history through the lens of retrospection, the Remix series confronts how our worldly perceptions evolve and transform over time, within the specific context of Germany’s dark and troubled past which so persistently haunts Baselitz’s work. As he himself professed, ‘What I could never escape was Germany, and being German’ (G. Baselitz quoted in N. Rosenthal, Baselitz, Michigan 2007, p. 36). Indeed Windrad (Remix), with its loose, expressive brushstrokes rendered in hues of twilight blue, black and white, incorporates a symbol widely recognised as the crest of Germany: the eagle. These mighty birds of prey, which appear as a reoccurring motif in many of Baselitz’s works, are depicted fourfold in this painting. They are arranged around a geometric square of pure white, meticulously defined and jarringly incongruous with its painterly surroundings of brushy dabs and strokes of paint. Almost void-like in its stark whiteness, the blank square seems to speak of the faltering and fallible human mind, a vacuum in a haze of swirling memories.
On a quest to forge a fresh, new identity for German painting after World War II, Baselitz drew inspiration from the pioneering artists of his generation. From the Abstract Expressionism of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, to the Neo-expressionism of Philip Guston, Baselitz developed a unique and distinctive approach which disrupted symbolic association in favour of the tactile activity of painting itself. His renowned upside-down paintings, which first came to prominence in the 1970s, exemplify this satirical drive by inverting imagery laden with political significance to subvert its meaning. By quite literally turning things on their heads, Baselitz found a means to refocus on the more painterly attributes of texture, form and surface, whilst refusing to shy away from the provocative and the controversial. Indeed Windrad (Remix), with its repeated depiction of the eagle, similarly contests this most heavily loaded of German symbols. Translating to Windmill, the title of the painting, as well as its composition and fleeting, rapid brushwork, is suggestive of the whirling of a wheel in motion. An allegory for the ever-turning helm of time, this work provides a vital and highly personal example of Baselitz’s later Remix compositions. In the artist’s own words, ‘Everything is a self-portrait, whether it’s a tree or a nude. It’s how the artist sees it … Everything that you see is a reflection of yourself’ (G. Baselitz, quoted in Georg Baselitz: Portraits of Elke, exh. cat., Fort Worth, Museum of Modern Art, 1997-1999, p. 15).