Georg Baselitz is at his best when he plays with humor, history, and paint all at once. In this exhibition, he presents sixteen new paintings that depict the same fictional image of Stalin and Lenin, seated and posed like Otto Dix’s 1924 portrait of his own parents. In each work, Baselitz flips the Communist leaders upside down and puts their penises on display. The paintings alternate between black and white backgrounds: Against the black, the two men are rendered in muted tones; against the white, they are composed of lurid smears of paint. It’s easy to dismiss images of these dictators as kitsch icons. But the faces of Stalin and Lenin would have haunted Baselitz’s childhood in East Germany, and to offer them as a pair of salacious lovers has blasphemous potential. His gesture also comes at a time when memories of both rulers are finding new resonance, as the history of hard-nosed Communist achievement is forced into a twisted marriage with new capitalism in Eastern Europe.

If socialist realism’s specter looms large in these works, so do the legacies of German and Abstract Expressionist painting, with Baselitz simultaneously celebrating and deriding their gestural techniques. More mysterious is the way he names his paintings after his contemporaries; among the titles are Sunning and mooning in the house of Jeff and Damien, 2008, and Marcel and Maurizio are kind of similar, one might assume, the pharmacy flies higher, 2008. John Currin, Richard Prince, Lucian Freud, and the Chapmans are also evoked. This is another disorienting act of narrative trickery by Baselitz: On the one hand, he could be giving these artists a monumentality similar to the Communist leaders; on the other, he could be poking fun at the iconic status they share, as some of the art world’s most desired. In these tough, complex paintings, Baselitz gathers the cult of the image, the cult of the contemporary artist, and the cult of money with a commitment to paint that leaves viewers suspended, confused, and severely tested.

— Anthony Byrt