Avignon

Georg Baselitz’s monumental masterpiece Avignon brings together eight paintings and stages, in spectacular fashion, a single protagonist: the artist’s ageing body.
Inspired in part by Pablo Picasso’s late paintings, but also by Lucas Cranach the Elder, Egon Schiele and Edvard Munch, whose presence can be felt throughout, these bodies seem to “dance upside down,” to borrow the words of the poet Antonin Artaud. The colour choices defy any realism; and yet these works are indeed a multiplied self-portrait of the artist, the colours forming a second skin that holds the last vital pulses of an unconscious energy.
“I always paint on the floor, because I find the world is better ordered on the floor,” Baselitz explains. “In a sense, my series on dance — and perhaps all my works — is a response to the peril of iconoclasm, to the absence of images, to the repression of art.”
This vast pictorial cycle becomes a stage where bodies and souls, captured in the lightning flash of artistic gesture, shelter those of the viewers in an intensified, closed space.