Georg Baselitz

Georg Baselitz is a German figurative painter, sculptor and graphic artist who rose to fame in the 1960s thanks to his shocking, dramatic artworks. His paintings, merging disparate sources of inspirations such as Soviet illustrations, Mannerist painting and African sculptures, established an iconic, unique language. In particular, Baselitz is known for inverting his subjects, painting them upside down in an attempt to probe the limits of art as representation.

Baselitz was born as Hans-Georg Kern in Deutschbaselitz, Saxony, in 1938, and grew up in a landscape torn by the devastations of World War II and the political tensions of a divided Germany. He attended the Academy of Arts in East Berlin but was expelled in 1957 for failing to adapt to the rigid standards of Social Realism. He then moved to West Berlin, where he completed his postgraduate studies in 1962 and took the pseudonym of Baselitz in honour of his birthplace.

Since the beginning of his career, the artist was interested in German Expressionist art and their ‘primitive’ inspirations, such as folk illustrations or children’s drawings. Together with fellow artist Eugen Schönebeck, he penned a ‘Pandemonic Manifestos’, a call for a new mode of expression that could convey the frustrations of creating art in post-war Germany. 

Such concern, stemming from biographical aspects, is a recurring element in Baselitz’s artistic process. In an interview, he stated ‘I was born into a destroyed order, a destroyed landscape, a destroyed people, a destroyed society. And I didn’t want to reestablish an order: I had seen enough of so-called order. I was forced to question everything, to be ‘naive’, to start again.’

Baselitz’s paintings, raw and expressive, are dominated by saturated tones and fragmented forms which forcefully rejected the contemporary artistic trends of abstractions and narrative. His distorted figures, isolated and surrounded by scenes of war and destruction, developed an original style that addressed, through its enigmatic symbolism, the social and political chaos of his times. 

In 1963 Baselitz had his first solo exhibition, which caused great scandal due to the inclusion of the painting ‘Die große Nacht im Eimer’ (1962–63). Portraying a grotesque figure with oversized genitals, the work was deemed obscene and was confiscated by the police. Later works, like ‘Helden’ (1965–66) deal with the subject of heroic historical figures, uncovering the atrocities of war through emotional visual responses. 

In 1969 Baselitz started to paint and display his subjects upside down. This subversive act had the effect of slowing down his artistic process, allowing him to reflect on the meanings of paint as a creative and representational tool. The resulting images, such as his portraits of icons of art history like Edvard Munch and Emil Nolde, remain figurative yet convey abstract qualities in their immediacy of forms and colours. In later years, Baselitz began creating large-scale wood sculptures, which he presented at the 1980 Venice Biennale. His first American retrospective was held in 1995 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. The artist has exhibited in New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Hong Kong, Zürich, and Tokyo, and his work can be found in the permanent collections of major institutions such as the Centre Pompidou, the Fondation Beyeler, the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Tate. Baselitz lives and works between Germany, Austria and Italy, constantly revisiting earlier paintings and evolving his definition of style, expression and form.