Georg Baselitz

Georg Baselitz (1938–2026) was a German painter, sculptor, and printmaker known for his raw, expressive style and his practice of painting images upside down. Born in Saxony in 1938, he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in West Berlin. Baselitz emerged in the 1960s with figurative works that pushed against postwar abstraction and challenged German cultural memory. Inverting his subjects from the late 1960s onward, he aimed to disrupt perception and emphasise the act of painting itself. His work often engages with themes of identity, history, and the body, and he remains a central figure in postwar European art. See Gagosian’s artist biography.