The artist Georg Baselitz has died at the age of 88. Widely regarded as one of the most important German painters of the late 20th century, Baselitz was born Hans-Georg Kern in 1938 in Deutschbaselitz, Saxony. He studied fine art in East Berlin for a short period until, in 1957, he was expelled for ‘sociopolitical immaturity’. At this point he moved to West Berlin and enrolled at the University of the Arts there, adopting his new surname, Baselitz, in tribute to his home town.
Like his compatriots and contemporaries Anselm Kiefer and Gerhard Richter, Baselitz’s work frequently tackled the subject of fascism – and the nature of national identity in Germany after the Second World War. In his early work he often confronted the legacy of Nazism with obscenity designed to shock and satirise. He later turned his attention to bodies, both human and animal, in impastoed canvases that frequently teeter between abstraction and figuration. His work was inspired by European modernist schools including Surrealism and Dada, but he was drawn to Old Masters too: some of his earliest works were drawings after Pontormo and Giovanni di Paolo. Perhaps the technique he is best known for is painting (and hanging) figurative scenes upside down, which he first trialled in 1969 and continued to do throughout his career. Baselitz said that the method helped to slow down his painting process and challenge viewers to look more closely and intentionally at the work in front of them.
Apollo spoke to Baselitz in 2019, before the exhibition ‘Baselitz – Academy’ opened at the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice. Read the full interview here.
