Biography of Georg Baselitz

Georg Baselitz (born Hans-Georg Kern on 23 January 1938 in Deutschbaselitz; died 30 April 2026) was a German-Austrian painter, printmaker and sculptor. He became internationally known for expressive figures, roughly worked sculptures and, above all, for paintings whose motifs he turned upside down from 1969 onward. This inversion was not a simple effect, but a way to set figuration and abstraction against each other.

Origins and training

Baselitz grew up in Saxony, in a landscape marked by National Socialism, war and the postwar years. In 1956 he began studying art in East Berlin, but was expelled after a short time. In 1957 he went to West Berlin and continued his training at the Academy of Fine Arts. He took the artist name Baselitz from his birthplace, Deutschbaselitz. From the beginning, he did not seek a smooth postwar modernism, but a painting that made rupture, violence, physicality and German history visible.

Scandal and early paintings

His first solo exhibition in Berlin in 1963 became a scandal when police confiscated two works for alleged obscenity. In the following years he created the so-called Heroes and New Types paintings: injured, staggering figures that do not triumph, but appear damaged. Baselitz set this language against the idea of an unburdened postwar art. His figures looked rough, large, fragmented and deliberately unreconciled.

Paintings upside down

In 1969 Baselitz began to paint and show motifs upside down. What mattered was that he did not simply rotate finished works; he composed them in the inverted orientation from the start. The motif remained recognizable, but lost its narrative obviousness. Viewers see subject, painted surface, color, gesture and disturbance at the same time. This method became his best-known sign, but it was more than a trademark: it forced a new look at the relation between image and meaning.

Sculpture, documenta and international effect

Baselitz also worked as a printmaker and sculptor. In 1980 he showed a roughly hewn wooden sculpture in the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale and carried the unrest of his painting into space. He appeared several times at documenta; at the same time, his appearances and decisions remained controversial. His art repeatedly circled around memory, violence, national symbols and the question of how German art could appear after 1945. Later came international retrospectives, high market prices and awards such as the Praemium Imperiale.

Late years and criticism

Even in old age, Baselitz continued working and exhibiting internationally. His importance for postwar art is considerable, but his public presence remained contradictory. Early on, his art provoked institutions and audiences; later, statements in interviews, especially about women artists, also drew criticism. His work stands not only for formal renewal, but also for the difficult role of an artist who sought contradiction and provoked contradiction himself.

Farewell

Georg Baselitz died on 30 April 2026 at the age of 88. His paintings and sculptures keep open the tension between figure and disturbance, memory and material, representation and an attack on representation. The upside-down motifs became his best-known sign, but their effect lay in making familiar images uncertain.