‘I apply the principles of disharmony, of imbalance, of destruction. And the misfortune, the really great misfortune, is that harmony ensues time and again.’ (Georg Baselitz in conversation with Heinz Peter Schwerfel (1989) in Georg Baselitz: Collected Writings and Interviews. p. 148) White Cube is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by celebrated German artist Georg Baselitz. Included in this exhibition, his first ever in Hong Kong, will be two previously unseen series of paintings, a new series of prints and a new, large-scale sculpture. Born in 1938 in Saxony, Baselitz is one of the leading artists of the post-war period whose distinguished career has spanned more than 50 years. A painter, printmaker, sculptor and draughtsman, his works explore collective, historical and personal themes, often featuring subjects repeatedly across different mediums that are drawn from both actual and imagined experience. Persistently shifting accepted boundaries and rejecting the conformism of abstraction, his work has consistently challenged the mainstream. In a recent series of paintings, all in oil on linen from 2011 and never previously exhibited, Baselitz tests compositional balance by painting in just one half of the canvas only, leaving an expanse of white either above or below the image. The paintings depict either the lower or upper half of a body, occasionally with the arm raised and bent limply at the elbow. The latter is an image that refers in turn to paintings by both Frank Auerbach and Egon Schiele, reflecting a referential urge in Baselitz’s work whereby he explores his affinities with other artists such as Dix, Munch, Kirchner and, in particular, De Kooning, sometimes devoting whole painting series to them. Encouraging an active reading of the image, the paintings are characterised by a bright luminosity and sense of mobility. Pushing gestural figuration to its limit, they depict the body as a dense mass of colour in tones of grey, pink, yellow or ochre, overlaid with a network of fine black lines that rather than emphasise or describe contours, seem to meander more naturally like the ‘lines of growth as with plants’. (Georg Baselitz quoted in Katy Siegel, ‘Double Positive’ (2014) in Georg Baselitz, Back Then, In Between, And Today. p.130) The leg-motif continues in a new, large-scale bronze sculpture and a series of 12 colourful line etched, aquatint prints. In Winterschläfer (which roughly translates as ‘hibernators’), a bundle of truncated legs are held together by three rings and placed on a low bench. A characteristically dissonant and mutable motif, the legs are reminiscent of collected natural forms, such as bunches of kindling twigs or asparagus yet also of some kind of strange, sacrificial offering. The sculpture’s dark, matt black patinated surface appears like charcoal or charred, burnt wood and the expressive scores and marks from the carving process created deftly with a chainsaw and axe, are still clearly visible. Recalling the sculptural mark-making of traditional or folk art as well as the mythical associations of wood, the work is both humorous and mysterious, dark and grotesquely formal. By extension, a new series of prints repeats the same motif in various ways. Viewed from the side, it becomes a densely abstract in some, drawn with thick, black brush strokes set against a single, strong background colour while in others, it is delicately rendered, sketched with a fine outline and left as a skeletal monochrome.