At the age of 88, the world-famous German painter and sculptor Georg Baselitz died on Thursday. real name Hans-Georg Kern. Baselitz, who was born on January 23, 1938 in Deutschbaselitz, Saxony, was one of the most important figures in European art of the 20th and 21st centuries and was a key representative of German Neo-Expressionism. The newspaper Die Welt was the first to report on his death, the DPA agency reported.
Baselitz made an indelible mark in the history of art with his decision in 1969, when he began to paint and exhibit his works upside down. The first picture painted in this way is Der Wald auf dem Kopf (Forest on the Head). “The object in the painting has no meaning. I paint it upside down to make it impossible for the viewer to perceive it as just an illustration and to force them to look at the painting itself,” said the artist about his unique technique.
His career was associated with frequent controversies. In 1963, his first solo exhibition caused a scandal, where the authorities confiscated his oil paintings Die große Nacht im Eimer (literally Easter in a Bucket) and Der nackte Mann (The Naked Man) for alleged obscenity. After a lengthy court case that lasted until 1965, the paintings were returned to the artist. In his work, Baselitz often dealt with the themes of German identity, post-war trauma and “destroyed order”.
“I was born into a destroyed order, into a destroyed country, into a destroyed morality. I didn’t want to restore anything, I just wanted to show the destruction as it is,” he said. He represented Germany at the Venice Biennale in 1980, where he presented his monumental wooden sculpture Modell für eine Skulptur. The rough-hewn figure with raised right hand has sparked heated debates about possible political allusions, although the artist emphasized its purely formal character.
After 2005, Baselitz returned to his best-known works (including Easter in a Bucket) and painted them again in a lighter, more transparent style, thus ironically and with a distance reviewing his own past. His works are part of the collections of the most prestigious institutions such as the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Tate Gallery in London or the Center Pompidou in Paris. Baselitz lived and worked alternately in Salzburg, Austria, at the Ammersee lake in Germany, and in the Italian city of Imperia. He is survived by his wife Johanna Elke, who was his muse for many years.
