Whether by turning his paintings upside down or with his widely reported comments that women are not good painters, Georg Baselitz, one of the most influential artists of his generation, has never been afraid to provoke. Now 85, he is exhibiting sculptures and sculpture drawings at the Serpentine. Here he talks about the German tradition of sculpting in wood, why it is important for artists to be provocative, and the “sad” German art scene.

The Art Newspaper: One of the sculptures on display at the Serpentine, Zero Dom (2021), is 9m high. Can you tell us how this work came about?

Georg Baselitz: All my work and my sculptures generally have a biographical or autobiographical background. Nothing I have made so far is conceivable without my background. Either the work itself or at least the title indicates that. Zero Dom, for example, is not a glimpse into the future, but rather describes what we perceive as the German past: in short, a burnt-down building. Zero Dom was initially a small wood sculpture comprising individual women’s legs about 3m high. A black patinated version cast in bronze followed. In 2018, I designed the stage set for Wagner’s opera Parsifal in Munich. The sculpture became part of the set, in an enlarged form. The Holy Grail was hidden inside it. Then I decided to make a 9m-high bronze casting out of it, which was first placed in front of the Institut de France when I was named a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts.

Your use of wood is rather unusual today, but it reflects a strong German tradition; we think of Tilman Riemenschneider, for example. Do you see yourself as a German artist in this tradition, or is your use of wood also inspired by other cultures?

German tradition is absolutely right. Tradition in general is very important for me. In Germany, we don’t have a significant tradition made visible by archaeological finds—as, for example, in the Mediterranean region. Since the 14th century, there have been large, decorative stone sculptures in our places of worship but, equally, very important wooden sculptures—for example, by Riemenschneider. And this continues until Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. My first attempt was a wooden sculpture in 1980 for the Venice Biennale and I stuck with it.

Ten wooden sculptures carved from individual tree trunks featured in the show have never been exhibited before. The Serpentine’s press release states that they relate to your personal life, including a childhood memory. Do you find that, with age, your personal history has become more important to your art, or is this childhood memoir showing three girls from a Nazi youth group also a political statement?

When I work, I always think about my past. My background was very ordinary and rural in a place far off the beaten track. When I make a sculpture, like BDM Group (2012), the goal is not a priority; it is more like a poetry that slowly unfolds. Again, the title clearly refers to my origins. The kinds of statements on daily politics that we see a lot in contemporary art are not my thing.

What can you tell us about the drawings on show and the production method?

I think the sculpture drawings are different from my other drawings. Sculpture drawings are important observations for working in three dimensions or on a wooden trunk whose original volume you reduce, by cutting and chopping and so on. Without the drawings, mishaps and misfortunes would be more frequent. I have been making such drawings since 1980 when I started sculpting. But there are none of these preparatory drawings by me before that.

Tracey Emin has said that your provocative approach to your art “kept the gateways open for artists like me”. Who are the art-world provocateurs of the next generation you most admire?

Tracey Emin said exactly the right thing. I have found in art history that when an artist, whether male or female, has success early in their career, it is usually with a provocative work. Most first works confirm that—whether by Tracey Emin or Paula Modersohn-Becker, by Cézanne, Frida Kahlo or Picasso. But being provocative just to provoke is difficult. I don’t think it works, or only for a short time. As far as the next generation is concerned, I still find the British art that surprised me when it first appeared—thanks to Charles Saatchi’s willingness to take risks—very interesting.

You have complained in the past that Berlin museums are not sufficiently interested in German art. Do you think that has changed? Will your work be shown in the new Berlin Modern art museum and, if so, which ones?

Just compare Berlin’s Nationalgalerie with its London equivalents. Berlin has hardly any contemporary art. After they tried to repair the past by recovering “degenerate” art or other works, not much new has happened in German museums, especially in Berlin—not to mention the low visitor numbers compared to other metropolises.

What do you think of the plans for the new museum, which is currently under construction?

I think any new museum in Berlin is superfluous.

What do you think are the most interesting developments in the art market today?

I have not concerned myself with digital art at all. For me, there is no such thing. I work with paper and pencil, with paint and canvas and with wood. And all the works by other artists that have drawn my attention use similar materials.

What worries you most about Germany and Europe today?

People abroad can’t imagine that in Germany, there is no cultural scene comparable to that in the UK, the US or France. It’s a regrettable, very sad state of affairs. But since there is a well-functioning international art market, German artists can make a living independently of Germany.

You are known for your ability to provoke not only with your art but also with your words—for example, with a statement in Der Spiegel in 2013 that women are not good at painting. Since then, you have expressed your admiration for many female artists. Museums are now making an effort to show more works by women. Do you welcome this attempt to redress the balance, or do you think it is a distortion?

There are only new artists and their first works, and of course that has nothing to do with gender or age, but everything to do with what appears on paper or on canvas.

The Guardian wrote last year that you are experiencing a “fiery and ruthlessly expressive late flowering” in your 80s. Do you think that’s true?

If what they say is true, then I’m very happy about that. Even if you leave out the “fiery” and “expressive”—and even “flowering”—it is still a fact that I have not given up, and that I continue despite an almost complete absence of pressure—less depressive, but even more dystopian.

Do you still work in your studio every day? Can you describe a typical working day?

I try to work every day, for a very limited amount of time. My physical condition is not the best. I use various aids such as walkers, carts, walking canes, chairs, extended brushes, extended palette knives and quicker decisions. So far, that’s working well.

• Georg Baselitz: Sculptures 2011-2015, Serpentine Galleries, until 7 January 2024

A bridge in the middle of a Montana forest appears eternally suspended mid-collapse, and a wooden dock curls up out of the water in just a couple of artist Cornelia Konrads’ site-specific interventions (previously). Using found materials like driftwood in the towering “tourbillon” or tapping into the regional vernacular like the ceramic tiles and stone in “refuge,” the artist re-interprets existing spaces by considering the tension between harmony and chaos in nature.

Konrads’ installations feature an interplay between permanence and weightlessness, as structures such as bridges, houses, and walls appear to defy gravity. In “La folie des folies (3 The Match),” for example, existing classical statues of Hippomedes and Atalanta appear to playfully lob marble pots across a lawn at one another. And in her most recent work, “fluchtweg / escape route,” a stone wall curls aside to open a footpath, transforming into an inviting gateway rather than a barrier.

The works often visually remark on a specific location, such as “refuge,” which incorporates “an ancient dry stone wall along an old link road between France and Spain, frequently used by refugees during the past centuries,” while “bridge” suspends local lodgepole pine and weathered barn boards over a forested ravine.

Explore more of Konrads’ land art and installations on her website.

Collaboration with Marco Dessardo, “pontoon” (2020), wood, plastic containers, iron, and aluminum, 900 x 120 x 150 centimeters. Site on the bank of the Canal de Bourgogne at the harbour of Migennes, for Tandems—Parcours artistique en plein air, Association Canal Satellite, Migennes, France

“tree house” (2022), bricks, cement, construction wood, wooden tiles, and steel cable, 4 x 4 x 6 meters, in Sologne, France

“refuge” (2019), stones, wood, and roof tiles, approxomately 5 x 2.5 x 1.5 meters, for Murets d’art, Mornans, Val de Drôme, France

“refuge”

“tourbillon” (2018/2021), driftwood, and metal, 600 x 400 x 400 cm, for Fondation Carmignac, Villa Carmignac, Île de Porquerolles, France.

“La folie des folies (3 The Match)” (2019), resin, div. paints and pigments, steel rope, two vases, 0.8 x 0.5 x 0.5 meters each, for the Grand Allée of Domaine de la Garenne-Lemot, Gétigné, France

“La folie des folies (3 The Match)”

“fluchtweg / escape route” (2023), local stones, mortar, wood, and metal, each side approximately 120 x 225 x 40 centimeters and Installation on a terrain of 550 x 100 centimeters. Site: small valley crossing the main hiking trail to Rittisberg, for Land-Art Rittisberg 2023, Ramsau am Dachstein, Austria

“tinkers” (2016), set design for a theatre play of ‘The Only Animal Theatre Society’ at Mt. Elphinstone Provincial Park, Roberts Creek, British Columbia

Detail of “bridge”

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. The article Bridges and Walls Defy Gravity in Cornelia Konrads’ Atmospheric Site-Specific Installations appeared first on Colossal.

There is an unutterable sadness to seeing Damien Hirst’s new paintings at Frieze. These big pictures of gardens, their blurry photorealism besmirched with Pollockesque drips in a desperate attempt to bring such duds to life, are the star turn at Gagosian, one of the mightiest of the art dealers whose chic stands fill the vast white tent of the art fair. But no one looks fooled. Few are giving Hirst’s paintings a second look at the VIP view, which is filled with moneyed collectors, articulate salespeople, my daughter and me.

I try to explain to her how exciting and dangerous Hirst once was, when he was young, when he got someone to kill a tiger shark so he could put it in an art gallery. “He had the shark killed?” “Well, you don’t just find a tiger shark on a beach. It was a different time.”

Hirst in the early 1990s made art seem unsafe, outrageous, like something that mattered in the world. Now he is painting gardens – which would be wonderful if he did it well. Unfortunately, he is no David Hockney. He still shows absolutely no talent for painting the real world. It is 14 years since Hirst first exhibited “proper” paintings by his own hand. He has learned nothing about the craft since. He is still bad, flat and unimaginative, yet he somehow gets a major display at the heart of an art fair that supposedly defines the new.

The misery of The Secret Gardens, as Hirst calls his snores, is not just that they are confirmation of his decline. It is also the fact these works are far from the dullest things here. Even in his dotage, Hirst has a bad-taste boldness that reminds you, vaguely, of what it’s like to see unexpected, exhilarating contemporary art. But there is precious little of that here.

Hirst didn’t become the extremely rich man he is by not having an eye for the market. And he has noticed the market wants paintings. Art collectors still buy video, photography and conceptual art – and, once, they even bought sharks. But oily colours on canvas have a pedigree, an aura of value, that has always made painting the blue chip definition of collectible art. At Frieze this year, there are so many paintings – from abstract monochromes to saucy murals – that when you do come across something that’s not another painting, you fixate on it. Gillian Wearing has made a giant charm bracelet with a life mask of her face and replicas of body parts all slung together on a thick chain: a sculpture of true unease. Wearing flirts with the surreal, yet her blankly accurate rendition of her face makes it all too real. Between the kitchen sink and the nightmare comes the uncanny.

It is largely Wearing’s generation of Young British Artists who shocked their way to fame three decades ago that stand out like treasures on a charm bracelet in this drab and pedestrian 20th edition of a once-rollicking art fair. You find yourself stopping by drawings by Glenn Brown that knottily riff on Rubens and Leonardo da Vinci. A painting by Gary Hume of huge pink flowers emerging like poisonous poems out of greenery has all the mystery that Hirst’s garden paintings lack. Yet once these artists were young rebels. Now they look like serious, thoughtful creators in a gathering full of fly-by-night, cynical attempts to please and get bought.

Wearing, Brown and Hume all made their bones in an era when contemporary art fought for attention and had to insist it mattered – when in Britain, at least, it seemed cutting edge to like it at all. Nowadays, barely anyone is brave enough to admit they don’t. Frieze in its two decades has helped to normalise the new. And domesticate it. And thus kill it.

Matthew Slotover and Amanda Sharp, who founded this art fair in 2003, no longer run it. Today, they create restaurants while Frieze is majority-owned by US “talent agency and holding company” Endeavor, with Simon Fox, a former media executive, as its CEO. So what’s cool about it?

Nothing that I can see, as dealers talk up their goods to one percenters at every booth. Why do people think that shoplike spaces filled with selections of saleable stuff make an ideal venue to appreciate the power of art? This week, just a few miles away, El Anatsui opened a superb installation in the Tate Turbine Hall, proving once more that great contemporary art thrives on huge post-industrial spaces. You couldn’t fit that in a booth. Instead, you get fragments of interest: a small yellow wooden foot hewn by Georg Baselitz; a tiny, hyperreal figure by Tomoaki Suzuki; a papier-mache creation by Monster Chetwynd based on the Victorian asylum artist Richard Dadd’s painting The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke.

As for the legions of paintings, they veer between the bland and bizarre. Chetwynd’s neo-Victorian work belongs to a veritable micro-fashion for costume dramas. A huge realistic landscape painting by Paulina Olowska looks as if it could have been painted a century ago. Maybe Olowska is hoping to get bought by Tate Britain and shown as a rediscovered Suffragette artist – since her picture stars a young woman dressed like a Virginia Woolf character striding through the fields. Back to the future, or a cosy neo-pastoral idyll? Constantin Nitsche’s painting La Visite III also looks like a classy book cover – or a storyboard for a Merchant Ivory film.

All of which makes such paintings lovely to hang on your wall, no? Only if you have a very high boredom threshold. They are at best slightly distracting for a moment. There is no sign here of artistic revolution or challenge. The great upheavals of modern art don’t just seem to have come to an end at Frieze. It’s as if they never happened. Whatever you think of Picasso’s personal life, he did shake the foundations of western culture. Whereas art now, on this evidence, exists to mildly entertain in a tasteful, reaffirming, bland way.

Frieze has become a corporate snooze. Have the galleries been actively encouraged by its big-business owners to Disneyfy themselves? Or is that just the way art is now? The neo-Victorian craze is very apposite. The crowds admiring these timid artistic efforts may not wear top hats and crinolines, yet we could just well be at the Royal Academy in 1850 hailing the latest efforts of Mr Landseer.

Perhaps I should take it all back about Hirst. Maybe he has a brutally accurate eye for the times. The avant garde is dead. The function of art now is to avoid frightening or shocking or, God forbid, exciting anyone. The deathliness of Hirst’s garden paintings conveys the dire truth about Frieze. It is a graveyard of creativity, not a blooming garden. The excitement it once created seemed to confirm an essay by the late American critic Dave Hickey praising “the big, beautiful art market”. The aura of this art fair is based on the idea that Hickey was right and money frees creativity.

But Hickey himself became disillusioned by the hypercommercialisation of art. And now, with the London art world stripped of the income stream from Russian oligarchs, Frieze looks about as creative as a shopping mall.

• Frieze London and Frieze Masters are at Regent’s Park, London, until 15 October.

A new fund of at least £40,000 ($49,000) has been launched for the Arts Council Collection to acquire work by early career and overlooked U.K.-based artists at Frieze London. The artists selected today for the fund’s inaugural year were Julianknxx, Anne Tallentine, Mark Corfield-Moore, and Tanoa Sasraku.

The new Frieze fund, which has been made available by a select group of patrons, including Tala Cingillioglu, Zelie Walker-Noble, and Suling Mead, comes at a time when the U.K.’s culture sector has faced catastrophic cuts in public funding. London was hit particularly hard when the annual funding for 2023-26 funnelled money into regional institutions.

“Following the Arts Council’s devastating cuts last year, philanthropic initiatives are more necessary than ever,” a spokesperson for Frieze told The Telegraph when the fund was announced. The selection committee scouting the booths for up-and-coming artists at this year’s Frieze London included the Hayward Gallery’s director Ralph Rugoff, the writer and editor for Frieze magazine Vanessa Peterson, the artist John Walter, and program director at Jerwood Arts, Harriet Cooper.

The Sierra Leonian artist Julianknxx’s is talk of the town in London at the moment, with his moving image work Chorus in Rememory of Flights (2023) that explores the Black Diasporic experience currently being exhibited at the Barbican’s Curve gallery until February 11, 2024. His work is also included in “A World in Common: Contemporary African Photography” at Tate Modern through January 14, 2024. His new film Black Room (2023), presented by Edel Assanti gallery in the Galleries sector, was quickly snapped up by the collection’s acquisition committee.

Anne Tallentire, These Aggregations 2 (2000) at “But this material…” at the MAC in Belfast in 2021. Photo courtesy of the MAC, Belfast.

Now in her 70s, Anne Tallentire has for decades been quietly drawing attention for her low-key artworks that are often made of everyday practical materials like string, screws and gaffer tape. She received a solo exhibition at the MAC in Belfast in 2021 and her work is currently on display in the Lavery Studio at Cromwell Place until October 15. The piece These Aggregations 2 (2000), a matching set of multi-colored boards that lean delicately against the wall at Hollybush Gardens gallery, also in the Galleries sector, has now entered the Arts Council Collection.

Tanoa Sasraku, Jacket Front R (2023) at Frieze London 2023. Photo courtesy the artist.

The artist Tanoa Sasraku has been turning heads for her “terratypes,” a unique hybrid medium that combines various methods like textile, painting, sculpture and print-making, as well as films like O’Pierrot (2019), through which she explored racist stereotypes and the Black British experience. Her work Jacket Front R (2023), offered as part of a solo presentation at Vardaxoglou, in Frieze’s focus section, was made with the unlikely combination of newsprint, foraged Cornish and Ghanaian earth pigments, tailor’s chalk, thread, and St Ives seawater.

Mark Corfield-Moore, Gilded (2023) at Frieze London 2023. Photo courtesy the artist.

Mark Corfield-Moore, who paints directly onto had woven textiles on canvas, was one of the shortlisted artists for this year’s John Moore Painting Prize. The Arts Council Collection acquired Gilded (2023), which is on display in the entrance corridor leading into the fair as part of a display by Outset. The Outset Contemporary Art Fund is a charity that set up an acquisition fund for Tate at the very first Frieze London in 2003. Now, it is spotlighting 20 artists who don’t yet have gallery representation but lease studios from its Studiomakers program, which offers affordable workspaces for creatives.

Patrons supporting the fund include Tala Cingillioglu from Cingilli Collection, Zelie Walker-Noble, independent art advisor and collector, and Patron, Suling Mead, Board Member for Contemporary Art Society. Mead called the fund an important supporter of “early career and overlooked artists” that enables them “to become a part of its history and future.”

Founded in 1946, the Arts Council Collection is a national loan collection of modern and contemporary British art with a focus on supporting promising emerging artists.

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