Georg Baselitz

Known for the audaciously simple but game-changing strategy of painting the motif on its head, Georg Baselitz has been a consistently challenging artist since the start of the 1960s. His work is always highly charged but surprisingly diverse, beginning with the raw, existential male figures famously removed from his first solo exhibition for indecency, and the series of “Heroes” that portrayed disabled and exposed figures in a destroyed landscape. During this development, the picture space became more and more fractured, and by the end of the decade the artist fully turned the world upside down: trees, factories, eagles, or nude self-portraits actually painted on their heads. This soon allowed him to freely paint and to engage with conceptual color schemes or off-beat themes, such as men eating oranges, Soviet propaganda paintings, or more recently so-called remixes in a reengagement with his own earlier work as a dialogue in time. Already a master of drawing, woodcut, and engraving,