Georg Baselitz: 1977-1992

An exhibition of major paintings and works on paper by one of the most important German artists of the post-war period.

Widely known for his inverted portraits, landscapes and still-lifes, Baselitz has long cultivated a subversive approach to figurative imagery. The artist’s debut exhibition in 1963 at Galerie Michael Werner in Berlin caused a scandal with its raw painterly style and disturbing content. In the following years, Baselitz created the renowned Hero and Fracture paintings, and a radical change in the artist’s work occurred in 1969 with his first inverted pictures. Seeking to, in his own words, “liberate representation from content”, landscape, nude and still-life motifs were rendered upside-down, focusing the viewer’s attention foremost on the painterly and optical elements of the picture.

The works on view in Georg Baselitz: 1977–1992 demonstrate the artist’s insistence on the motif as a catalyst for painterly invention.