Georg Baselitz
Georg Baselitz
Deutschbaselitz, Germany, b. 1938

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.
2024
Georg Baselitz: The Last Decade. Sabancı Museum, Istanbul.
2024
Belle Haleine. Galleria degli Antichi Sabbioneta, Italy
2023
The Painter in His Bed. Gagosian, 555 West 24th Street, New York
Solo Exhibition
10 Apr 2024
Georg Baselitz A Confession of My Sins
‘In a sense, what painters really do when they paint is paint a situation that they are in: they paint actions.’ — Georg Baselitz
White Cube Bermondsey