Georg Baselitz

Georg Baselitz was born Hans-Georg Kern on 23 January 1938 in Deutschbaselitz, a small town in Saxony, and later adopted the name of his birthplace as his own — a gesture that bound his identity to his origins at the moment he was forging an entirely new artistic language. After studying in both East and West Berlin, he emerged as one of the most consequential German painters of the postwar era, working across painting, sculpture, and printmaking to produce a body of work that confronted the psychological and historical wreckage left by the Second World War.

Baselitz's early paintings announced an uncompromising sensibility. The Heroes series, produced between 1965 and 1966, presented monumental figures — battered, isolated, stripped of triumph — against barren, indeterminate grounds. Works from this group, including Ein neuer Typ and Die großen Freunde, established his reputation as a central voice in German Neo-Expressionism and placed questions of postwar masculine identity and historical memory at the heart of his practice. The confrontational energy of his work had already surfaced even earlier: Die große Nacht im Eimer, painted between 1962 and 1963, was removed from his first solo exhibition for its grotesque, sexualized imagery — an episode that marked him immediately as an artist unwilling to accommodate institutional comfort. In 1969, with Der Wald auf dem Kopf, Baselitz introduced the formal device that would define his mature practice: the inverted figure. By turning his subjects upside down, he severed the painted image from its conventional narrative function, insisting on the autonomy of pictorial form. Works such as Der Adler (1972), Fingermalerei II (1975), Elke (1976–77), and Ein neuer Mann (1981) extended this strategy across symbolic, intimate, and historical subject matter alike. His transition into sculpture produced another landmark: Modell für eine Skulptur, a painted wood work presented at the 1980 Venice Biennale, which brought him major international recognition as a sculptor and pressed against the boundaries separating the two disciplines.

Baselitz's graphic work is documented through published catalogues raisonnés covering woodcuts, linocuts, and etchings from 1963 through 1989, with the first catalogue of prints produced for a 1977 retrospective at Schloss Morsbroich. His work is held in the collections of the Centre Pompidou and the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris, the Guggenheim Bilbao, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C., and the ZKM | Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, among others. A major retrospective at the Centre Pompidou was reviewed by Studio International in 2021, and Artforum published coverage of his work as recently as 2024. His gallery relationships have spanned decades and continents, with representation through Galerie Michael Werner, Michael Werner Gallery in New York, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in Paris and Salzburg, Gagosian in New York, London, and Hong Kong, White Cube in London and Hong Kong, and Cristea Roberts Gallery in London for his prints and works on paper. Solo exhibitions have appeared at venues including the Museo Novecento in Florence, Skarstedt in New York, and numerous gallery spaces across Europe and the United States. The Art Newspaper reported on his death in 2026 at the age of 88.