Along with Anselm Kiefer and Gerhard Richter, Georg Baselitz is one of the big three of German painting: big themes, big works, very big money. You can’t miss the bigness in this show. Baselitz has taken over the whole of White Cube, and that’s a lot of space.
Giant paintings and bronzes cast from hacked-up wood command the rooms. The theme seems to be personal mortality, though the massive crude black sculptures with their jackboot heels (a Baselitz motif) and the dark, smeary painting ‘Ofenruß’ (‘Oven Soot’) hint at Germany’s past. In most of the canvases one or two pallid figures appear and reappear: sometimes upside-down, sometimes on their sides, sometimes headless or blushed with a rosy wash, floating on black grounds that are mottled like ancient skin or the night sky. They’re called things like ‘A Poor Future’ and ‘Dystopian Couple’: unusually for Baselitz, there aren’t many laughs here.
In a way, the scale of these works makes them hard to get a handle on. They’re undeniably impressive but so what? In this, though, they reflect Baselitz’s perennial anxieties: how can you hope to make work about death or art or history, without just standing there at a loss? Things are becoming the past even as we experience them, and there are much worse places to realise that than this sombre show.