Georg Baselitz
Turned the subject upside down in 1969 and has painted it that way ever since.
Georg Baselitz was born Hans-Georg Kern in Deutschbaselitz in Saxony in 1938 and took his name from the village after moving to West Berlin, having been expelled from art school in the East. His first exhibition, in 1963, was raided and two paintings were seized, which set the tone. In 1969 he began inverting the motif — the figure, the eagle, the tree painted upside down — not as a joke but to force attention onto the paint rather than the thing depicted, and he has done it consistently for over fifty years since. He represented Germany at the Venice Biennale in 1980 with a sculpture that caused its own scandal, and he remains one of the defining post-war German painters.
The paintings are unique and large. Alongside them sits a printed output of real substance — woodcuts, etchings, drypoints and linocuts, often in very small editions and frequently printed and reworked by the artist himself, so impressions from a single edition can differ visibly from one another. Orientation is a genuine practical issue: inverted images are hung the wrong way up more often than one would expect, and the signature and date, usually at what reads as the bottom, settle it. The sculpture is unique, in roughly worked and painted wood.
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