Georg Baselitz, painter who turned art upside down, dies at 88

Georg Baselitz, the German painter famous for his upside-down figures, died peacefully Thursday at 88, according to the Ropac Gallery.reuters
Born in 1938 near Dresden, Baselitz began inverting his paintings in 1969 to strip images of narrative and refocus viewers on the act of painting itself.tate
Major exhibitions of his new work were scheduled to open in Venice and London in the coming months, underscoring his prolific late-career output.whitecube

German Neo-Expressionist Painter Georg Baselitz Dies at 88

Georg Baselitz, the German painter and sculptor who became one of the most influential figures in postwar European art through his radical practice of painting his subjects upside down, has died at the age of 88. His death on Thursday, April 30, was confirmed to AFP by Ropac Gallery, which had a long-standing professional relationship with the artist. Die Welt was among the first outlets to report the news.reuters

In a statement, the gallery said Baselitz, who “shaped German visual art for a generation,” had “died peacefully”.yahoo

A Career Built on Provocation

Born Hans-Georg Kern on January 23, 1938, in Deutschbaselitz, a town near Dresden in Saxony, Baselitz grew up amid the devastation of World War II, an experience that would shape the whole of his artistic life. “I was born into a destroyed order, into a destroyed landscape, into a destroyed people, into a destroyed society,” he once said.instagram

After studying art in East and then West Berlin, he adopted the name Baselitz in tribute to his hometown and quickly established a reputation for confrontational figurative painting. In 1969, he began painting his subjects upside down — a strategy he would pursue for the rest of his career. The inversion, he explained, was intended to strip his images of narrative content and force viewers to focus on the act of painting itself: the brushstrokes, the colors, the rhythms. Six of those early inverted paintings were later donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.michaelwerner

Reshaping Postwar German Art

Baselitz emerged alongside peers such as Anselm Kiefer and Gerhard Richter as part of a generation that reinvigorated figurative painting in Germany and internationally. His work, which spanned painting, sculpture, and graphic art across more than six decades, helped define the Neo-Expressionist movement that gained worldwide momentum in the late 1970s and 1980s.contemporaryartissue

His output remained prolific well into his late years. A major exhibition of new work, “Eroi d’Oro,” was due to open at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice on May 6, coinciding with the Venice Biennale. White Cube Bermondsey in London had also announced a large-scale show of new paintings for June.whitecube

A Legacy in Inversion

Baselitz’s art was collected by major museums worldwide and his influence extended well beyond Germany’s borders. As the Brooklyn Rail noted, “his use of inversion introduces an abstract element to our response, a quality that makes his art both more eloquent and more original”.brooklynrail

He is survived by a body of work that, even when turned on its head, stood firmly at the center of contemporary art for more than half a century.