Georg Baselitz

Georg Baselitz

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Georg Baselitz was born in 1938 as Hans-Georg Kern in Deutschbaselitz, Saxony. Baselitz's long and challenging career is marked by intense periods of activity, usually culminating in a heroic masterpiece or group of master works, followed by startling renewal and rethinking of his subject. A traditional artisan, he works in equally traditional media---painting, drawing, printmaking, and wood sculpture—often on a monumental scale.

From the outset, Baselitz confronted the visceral realities of history and the human and cultural tragedies of a world in turmoil with a cast of tragic anti-heroes, from the grotesque, masturbating boy of Die grosse Nacht im Einer (Big Night Down the Drain) of 1963, to the broken soldiers of the Fracture paintings and the inverted figures of the disturbing "upside-down paintings." In 1980, at the German pavilion at the Venice Biennale, he caused a stir with a monumental carved wooden figure, which appeared to making a Hitlerian salute. Evidently, what it is to be German and a German artist have been very much on Baselitz's mind throughout his career –paintings abound with child Hitlers and dismembered woodcutters-- although his oeuvre owes as much to a broader range of influences, including art brut and the drawings and writings of Antonin Artaud, as well as the sixteenth century German woodcuts and African sculptures. With the reunification of Germany in 1990, however, the angst seemingly ebbed from his vision and he produced a series of paintings that he refers to as "sentimental pictures" about his childhood, home, and family in the former East German province of Saxony