Книга Без автора: Georg Baselitz

Proverbially known for the audaciously simple but game-changing strategy of painting the motif on its head, Georg Baselitz has been a consistently challenging artist since the start of the 1960s. His work is always highly charged but surprisingly diverse, starting with the existential figures of paintings such as The Big Night Down the Drain, famously removed from his first solo exhibition for indecency, and the series of “Heroes” that portrayed disabled and exposed figures in a destroyed landscape and order. More and more, the picture space itself became fractured, and by the end of the decade, the artist fully turned the world upside down: trees, factories, eagles, or nude self-portraits actually painted on their heads. This allowed him to freely paint and to engage with conceptual color schemes or off-beat themes, such as men eating oranges, memories of Soviet propaganda paintings, or more recently so-called remixes in a reengagement with his own earlier work as a dialog in time. Already a master of drawing, woodcut, and engraving,from 1980 on Baselitz also created rough sculptures hewn from wood with axe and chainsaw, then adding bronze to his materials in the late 2000s.