The beautiful upside-down world of Georg Baselitz

The hand is one of the first images to appear in art. There are handprints on the walls of caves in southern France, Indonesia and Argentina, made up to 50,000 years ago, which, although no doubt an illusion, seem to be waving at us across a vast gulf of time.

The gigantic paintings of golden hands by Georg Baselitz at White Cube Mason’s Yard don’t quite do that, but the effect is still solemn and primeval. They dangle in front of you, fingers extended downwards, cut off at the wrist, each one the size of a whole body and glittering on a background of brownish black. There are also some drawings and sculptures of hands on view, but the star turns are the big canvases. They look like altarpieces dedicated to a cult of the hand and what it can do.

Baselitz is of course one of the best known and, at 82, senior of living painters. And one of the points about painting, as opposed to more mechanical media, is that the artist’s manual dexterity is crucial to the result. Admittedly in this case Baselitz needed his arms too as he first painted each hand on one canvas. Then he pressed it on to another using a broom and — hey presto! — a monumental, one-off painted print combining the creative power of human craft and the lovely, glutinous medium of paint. Thus Baselitz actively encouraged beautiful splatters and splodges while just, you might say, by his fingertips retaining the recognisable shape of a thumb and four digits.

At Michael Werner Gallery, 22 Upper Brook Street, there’s a sizeable survey of earlier work by Baselitz, some dating back to the 1960s. Its title, I Was Born into a Destroyed Order, is almost literally the case since he was brought up in a little village a few miles from the burnt-out ruins of Dresden.