Artist Database

Printmaker, painter, and sculptor Georg Baselitz, born in 1938 in Deutschbaselitz, Germany, was one of the most influential German artists of the post-war period and known as a leader of the Neo-expressionist movement. Born Hans-Georg Kern, he adopted the name Baselitz in 1961, taking it from his birthplace. He studied at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in East Berlin before moving to West Berlin in 1957, where he continued his studies at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste.

Baselitz emerged as an artist in the early 1960s with a deliberately confrontational approach to painting, challenging the dominant abstraction of the period through raw, expressive figuration. His early work was marked by provocative imagery and an interest in the psychological and physical dimensions of the human figure. Alongside painting, he developed an important printmaking practice, working extensively in woodcut, linocut and etching.

In 1969, Baselitz began painting figures upside down, a radical compositional strategy that became his signature. By separating subject from conventional orientation, he encouraged viewers to focus on colour, gesture, texture and the materiality of paint rather than narrative or representation. His practice subsequently expanded to include sculpture, drawing and monumental printmaking, while recurring subjects have included the figure, landscape, birds and personal and cultural memory.

Baselitz represented Germany at the Venice Biennale in 1980 and has since been the subject of major international exhibitions and retrospectives. His works are held in leading public collections worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and the Museum Ludwig, Cologne. The artist passed away in April of this year, at the age of 88.