Painted in 2014, Immer Noch Unterwegs (Still on the Road) operates at an intersection of the key themes characteristic of Georg Baselitz’s artistic production from the last decades. Rendered against the monochrome dark ground, two upright figures reference the composition of the artist’s painting Die Grosse Freunde (The Great Friends) (1965) – the work which possesses an almost iconic significance in Baselitz’s oeuvre as a whole. Immer Noch Unterwegs therefore presents an important extension of the artist’s ‘Remix Paintings’ (2005-2014) in which Baselitz revisits his earlier painterly motifs. Seeking to re-interpret the past imagery in the context of contemporary culture, the Remix series emerges as a resolute exercise in introspection, a meditation on the passage of time and shifting artistic sensibility. As the artist explained in an interview with the curator Okwui Enwezor, “It’s not a question of making the pictures I’ve already done better, since my pictures from the past are actually okay, instead, it’s an entirely hermetic preoccupation with myself, with results that have an impact toward the outside, and that should impact the outside.”

Taking Die Grosse Freunde as the point of departure, the present work offers a reflection on Baselitz’s artistic and personal journey. One of the most thematically and formally complex paintings in the landmark ‘Hero’ series (1965-1966), Die Grosse Freunde presents a poignant image of human companionship against the background of the ruins of the postwar Germany.