Artist Information
Artist
Georg (Hans Georg Kern) Baselitz, RA Hon.Role
ArtistDate made
circa 1989Time Period
20th CenturyNotes
ARTIST BIOGRAPHY
Born in Saxony, later part of East Germany, Georg Baselitz (born Hans-Georg Kern) is recognized as an internationally acclaimed German artist (granted Austrian citizenship in 2015). For some 60 years, Baselitz has been practicing the arts of painting, drawing and printmaking, and, in the later 1970s, sculpture. Throughout his career, Baselitz has varied his style with great originality exploring collective, historical and personal themes, often featuring subjects repeatedly across different mediums.
In 1956, whilst studying painting at the Academy of Art in East Berlin, he was expelled for ‘political immaturity’ with non-conformity to DDR (Deutsche Demokratische Republik of East Germany) standards in art. He then enrolled at the Academy in West Berlin completing his studies in 1962. During this period he adopted the surname Baselitz, reflecting his birth place, Deutschbaselitz. His first solo exhibition took place in 1963 in Berlin amid controversy when several of his paintings were confiscated by the German authorities on the grounds of public indecency, apparently an intentional provocative move on the part of the artist. After his scholarship studies in Florence in 1965, Baselitz embarked on a series of paintings depicting monumental male figures known as the “Hero paintings”. In 1969 he initiated what became his signature motif for the next 50 years, depicting all his imagery upside down. In the 1970s he continued to work outside the mainstream, and by the 1980s he had established an international reputation. He was also making monumental wooden sculptures of heads and figures with irregular forms. He has had major solo exhibitions and retrospectives over the last decades and exhibits regularly at galleries in London, Paris, New York, Salzburg and Berlin. His paintings, sculptures and prints are in the collections of major museums around the world.
To this day, Baselitz remains an active and controversial artist, highly critical of German politics. He was a member of the Academy of the Arts, Berlin (1984-1992) and is an Honourary member, Royal Academy of Arts, London. He was awarded the Légion d'Honneur by the French government in 2012.![Die Mauer [The Wall], artwork for limited edition Château Mouton Rothschild Paulliac wine label, ca. 1989. Chromolithograph on paper by Georg (Hans Georg Kern) Baselitz, RA Hon.](https://d8e7jbdw4fu0e.cloudfront.net/5457/3a219130-d3c1-11ec-b228-51d82028998f-vUVFE1e.lg@2x.jpg)
