Georg Baselitz

Donated by Thaddaeus Ropac, London · Paris · Salzburg · Seoul

Basel, Galerie Buchmann; Frankfurt, Galerie Neuendorf, Berlin; Galerie Fahnemann, Georg Baselitz, Adler, 53 Gouachen und Zeichnungen, June 1987 – April 1988, no. 27, p. 60, illustrated in color

New York, Nyehaus, Georg Baselitz, Works from the 1960s and 1970s, January – February 2007, p. 62, illustrated in color

Georg Baselitz has had a profound influence on international art since 1960 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 individualistic. Since then, Baselitz has constantly renewed his practice through formal developments, drawing upon art history and his own extensive oeuvre, never allowing himself to become restricted by a single, identifiable style.

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 revolutionizing 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 color and material that would come to the fore in his expressionist color 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.

The urge towards constant innovation has been present throughout his career, as in the Remix Paintings he has been creating since 2006 that re-examine the iconography of past works. By revisiting his own motifs and integrating subtle references to art history, Baselitz offers a reflection on the significance of painting itself. Asked about this self-referentiality, he stated: 'I kept sinking into myself, and everything I do is being pulled out of myself.' In recent works that feature the figures of the artist and his wife Elke, Baselitz engages in the struggle of representation, the inescapability of subjectivity, and the representation of the self through a significant other. He has also introduced a new technique in recent works created using a transfer method, in which the lightness, boldness and vivid coloration is conceived as an homage to Roy Lichtenstein.

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