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| Baselitz | |
|---|---|
| Name | Georg Baselitz |
| Birth name | Hans-Georg Kern |
| Birth date | 23 January 1938 |
| Birth place | Deutschbaselitz, Saxony, Germany |
| Nationality | German |
| Known for | Painting, sculpture |
| Movement | Neo-Expressionism, Postwar German art |
Baselitz Georg Baselitz is a German painter and sculptor whose provocative, large-scale works and reversed-figure technique reshaped postwar European art. He became prominent in the 1960s for confronting German history and identity through expressive figuration, monumental canvases, and public controversies. His career spans painting, printmaking, and carved sculpture, and he has been associated with major institutions, critics, and exhibitions across Europe and North America.
Baselitz was born in Deutschbaselitz, Saxony, in 1938, and experienced the upheavals of World War II and the postwar division of Germany, events that later informed his thematic focus on memory and trauma. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, East Berlin before moving to West Germany to attend the Academy of Fine Arts, West Berlin and the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Hamburg, where teachers and peers from movements linked to Expressive figuration and postwar debates influenced his development. Encounters with artists, galleries, and critics in Düsseldorf, Munich, and Frankfurt am Main introduced him to the networks that would support his early exhibitions and critical attention.
Baselitz began exhibiting in the early 1960s at venues in West Germany and quickly attracted controversy for works that tested exhibition norms and legal limits, including public debates in Berlin and other cultural centers. His breakthrough came with a series of expressive paintings that reacted to contemporaries associated with Informel and the international reception of Abstract Expressionism, prompting dialogue with critics, curators, and collectors across Europe and North America. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s he expanded into sculpture, producing carved and cast works shown in institutions such as the Nationalgalerie and major biennials and triennials, while engaging with galleries in Cologne, London, and New York City. In later decades he continued to exhibit in retrospectives organized by museums like the Tate Modern, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Guggenheim Museum, consolidating his status within postwar art histories.
Baselitz developed a signature practice that includes inverted figures, large-scale canvases, and a rugged painterly surface influenced by Emil Nolde, Max Beckmann, and other antecedents of German Expressionism. His work dialogues with motifs from German Romanticism, Friedrich Schiller-era symbolism, and the visual culture of East Germany and West Germany during the Cold War. Themes recur: collective memory of World War II, national identity, corporeality, and the body as a site of political and existential inquiry; these are treated through techniques linked to woodcut, etching, and painted impasto. He also referenced non-German sources, engaging with Paul Cézanne, Edvard Munch, and modernist sculptural traditions from Alberto Giacometti to Constantin Brâncuși in his approach to volume and distortion.
Key series include his early figurative paintings of the 1960s that provoked legal and moral debates in cities like Hamburg and Berlin, later paintings of the 1980s and 1990s that appeared in major European museums, and carved sculptures displayed in public commissions and museum plazas. Notable exhibitions were retrospectives at institutions such as the Stedelijk Museum, the Pinakothek der Moderne, and the Centro per l'arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci, as well as participation in international events like the Venice Biennale, the Documenta exhibitions in Kassel, and the Biennale di Venezia. Important individual works and series entered collections of the British Museum, the National Gallery of Art, the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, and private collections associated with prominent collectors and foundations in Germany, France, and the United States.
Critical responses to Baselitz have ranged from admiration in institutions such as the Neue Nationalgalerie and academic circles at the University of Fine Arts of Hamburg to polemics in mass media outlets in Germany and international art journals. He influenced younger generations associated with Neo-Expressionist movements in Germany and the broader European scene, intersecting with artists, critics, and curators engaged in postwar reevaluation of German culture. Debates around censorship, historical accountability, and the role of figuration in contemporary art often invoke his work in discussions at symposia in Paris, London, and New York City, ensuring his continuing presence in scholarship, museum programming, and market discourse.
Category:German painters Category:Living people