Georg Baselitz

 

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Georg Baselitz was born in Deutschbaselitz, in what was later East Germany, in 1938. He is regarded as one of the foremost artists of Germany, and has been accorded retrospective exhibitions internationally - a 2010 show in Baden-Baden features 50 years of Baselitz's work.
Baselitz has strongly influenced the generation of painters that came of age during the early 1980’s, but he is not a Neo-Expressionist. Although his paintings may remain deeply engaged with the problems of the postwar period in Germany, in his career Baselitz has always attempted to make a stylistic break with what he had done in the past. Moreover, his artistic imagination draws on the entire inventory of Western art and culture.

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Georg Baseitz was born in Deutschbaselitz, in what was later East Germany, in 1938. In 1956, he moved to East Berlin, and in 1957 to West Berlin. In West Berlin, he took the name of Baselitz in honor of the town of his birth.

Baselitz says that he was deeply influenced by an exhibition of American abstract expressionism, particularly the work of Jackson Pollock, which he saw when he was a student at the Academy of Fine Arts in East Berlin. Intent to find alternatives to Socialist Realism and Art Informel, Baselitz became interested in the art of the mentally ill. His first exhibition -in 1963 in West Berlin -caused a public scandal, with several paintings - Big Night Down The Drain and Naked Man being confiscated for indecency. From 1965, Baselitz spent six months at Villa Romana in Florence, Italy, where he produced Animal Piece, and the Tierstück Epictures. This stay in Florence was the start of annual trips to Italy with a studio in Florence that he used from 1976 until 1981. In 1987 he established a studio, that he still uses, in Imperia, Italy.

In 1969 Baselitz started painting works with the subject upside down, a device that offered a way to reject his own representational work and to challenge the conventional way of looking at paintings. The inverted figure has become one of the highly recognizable trademarks of his works. In the 1970’s he produced landscapes with the theme of picture-within-a-picture. He produced the major composition Dinner in Dresden in 1983, and for a while Christian motifs figured prominently in his work. Baselitz made use of a wide variety of different media to avoid getting into a routine. Aside from painting and sculpture, Baselitz also worked with the techniques of woodcut and linocut prints, illustrated books, etchings, drawings, watercolors, and he tried his hand as well at stage set-design.

In 1975 Baselitz traveled to New York and Brazil for the first time, for the Sao Paulo Biennale. In New York he set up a studio for two weeks, and produced two Saxon landscapes and Eagle drawings. By 1980 his reputation was established and he was chosen to represent Germany at the Venice Biennale. With the sculpture he made for the German pavilion in Venice in 1980 Baselitz joined the ranks of painter-sculptors. Since the late 1980’s he has been regarded as one of the foremost artists of Germany, and has been accorded retrospective exhibitions internationally. A 2004 retrospective in Bonn, showed 45 years of Baselitz' work.

Baselitz has strongly influenced the generation of painters that came of age during the early 1980’s, but he is not a Neo-Expressionist. Although his paintings may remain deeply engaged with the problems of the postwar period in Germany, in his career Baselitz has always attempted to make a stylistic break with what he had done in the past. Moreover, his artistic imagination draws on the entire inventory of Western art and culture.

Biography

  1938  Born on 23 Jan. in Deutschbaselitz, Saxony as Hans–Georg Kern
  1957-62 Learned at the High School for Creative Arts in West Berlin
  1961 Adopted the name Georg Baselitz in a tribute to his home town
  1963 First solo exhibition in West Berlin
  1966 First creation of the so-called Fracture Paintings
  1969 First painting with the motif upside down The Forest On Its Head
  1972 Participated in Documenta in Kassel
  1975  Participated in the Saõ Paulo Biennale
  1980 Showed his first sculpture in the German pavilion at the Venice Biennale
  1981 First exhibition in New York
  1982 Participated in Documenta in Kassel
  1990 First exhibition in the reunified Germany at the Altes Museum in Berlin
  1993 Participated in Venice Biennale
Drawings' exhibition at the Centre George Pompidou, Paris
  1995 Large retrospectives in New York, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Berlin and Stockholm
  1998  Retrospective in Mexico City
  2004

Large retrospective, Bonn

Awarded the Praemium Imperiale Prize for Painting, the Japan Art Association, Tokyo