Georg Baselitz: Pictures Turning the Head Topsy-Turvy

Bundeskunsthalle
Friedrich-Ebert-Allee 4
April 2, 2003–August 8, 2004

Curated by Susanne Kleine

Georg Baselitz’s art is about retrospection. By distancing himself from a recent past, he draws nearer to it in order to cease hankering after it. Comprising roughly 130 paintings and sculptures from 1959 to the present, this retrospective, organized in close cooperation with the artist, will indeed turn your head around. By juxtaposing older and newer works, it zeroes in on key ideas and motifs in Baselitz’s oeuvre. His well-known upside-down paintings signal his supreme subject: the genre of art itself. Not content simply to dismantle its techniques, styles, and icons, Baselitz has gone about reinventing its categories—the nude, portrait, and landscape—for forty-five years. The catalogue includes essays by Werner Hofmann and others.

— Pamela Kort

Mona Hatoum

Kunstmuseum Bonn
Museumsmeile Helmut-Kohl-Allee 2
June 17–August 29, 2004

Hamburger Kunsthalle
Glockengiesserwall
March 26–May 31, 2004

Magasin III
Frihamnsgatan 28
June 17–August 29, 2004

Curated by Christoph Heinrich

Most commentators on Mona Hatoum (Edward Said among them) invoke figures of exile and displacement, and not without reason: Explorations of national and cultural identity preoccupy the work of this London-based Palestinian artist. Over the past decade the dispossession she has charted has been of a more intimate and corporeal sort, such as endoscopic video footage of her own body. This midcareer survey—Hatoum’s largest solo show to date and her first in Germany—features over sixty works from the past thirteen years: video, performance, photography, sculpture, and posters. The catalogue includes essays by curator Christoph Heinrich and others. Look for the new installation created specifically for the Kunsthalle’s massive central dome.

— Lisa Pasquariello