White Cube Hong Kong is pleased to announce ‘Sofabilder / Sofa Pictures’, an exhibition of recent paintings and drawings by German artist Georg Baselitz that give new and haunting form to his lifelong quest to unite abstraction and figuration in an inextricable dance. A nude female form based loosely on Baselitz’s wife Elke, whom he’s depicted throughout his career and now conjures from memory, is a central motif in each work.

Pablo Picasso’s 1942 painting L’Aubade (The Serenade) is among the inspirations for Baselitz’s images. Based on Titian’s 1538 Venus of Urbino, Picasso’s odalisque is a highly abstracted female figure reclining on a couch while being serenaded by a lute player. References to the Spanish artist appear in the playful titles of paintings, such as Woman and the Congo Mask (2021), and in the guitars that appear in a number of the untitled drawings. Additionally, Picasso was an unsparing observer of the aging process, which is an overarching theme in these and many of Baselitz’s recent works.

Gallery address: 50 Connaught Road Central