Georg Baselitz

Straßenbild
a very special loan

14 Jun 2014 - 16 May 2016

'They're waving, shouting and hanging, sometimes falling out the window. The background is mostly dark; you can't see what's behind the figures. These are women at windows, each isolated from her environment and not communicating with the others.' This is how the German artist Georg Baselitz (1938) described his Straßenbild, a monumental work made up of eighteen paintings, which he finished in 1980. A year later the series was exhibited at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and in 1989 the work was acquired by the new Kunstmuseum Bonn. That was the same year in which De Pont was founded, and the purchase of this work was also discussed here at that time. Now, twenty-five years later, Straßenbild came to Tilburg as part of a temporary exchange between the collections of the Kunstmuseum and De Pont. In return De Pont has sent two Große Geister, by Thomas Schütte, to Bonn for two years. Although this is certainly a sacrifice – as will be the lack of access to Richard Serra's Gutter Splash Two Corner Cast, which needs to be hidden behind one of the walls on which Straßenbild will be shown – we will indeed have the chance to become acquainted with another masterpiece from the twentieth century.