Deutschbaselitz, Germany, b. 1938

Georg Baselitz has had a profound influence on international art since 1980 and is indisputably one of the most important artists of our time. He shaped a new identity for German art in the second half of the 20th century; in reaction to the trauma and tragedy of the Second World War, he developed an artistic vocabulary which draws on the work of his forebears, whilst remaining unique and wholly individual. Since then, Baselitz has consistently renewed his practice through formal developments, often responding to art history and his own extensive oeuvre to develop his central themes through an ever-evolving, yet distinct, mode of artistic expression. The artist has been painting his compositions upside down since 1969. For Baselitz, this novel format was a way of emptying form of its content, navigating between abstraction and figuration, and revolutionising a medium that was then regarded as irredeemably conventional. His directly tactile method of painting with his fingers in the 1970s encouraged a freer use of colour and material that would come to the fore in his expressionist colour fields of the 1980s. This was a seminal decade for the artist, opening with his selection to represent Germany at the 1980 Venice Biennale alongside Anselm Kiefer, which marked his first foray into sculpture.