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Joseph Clark Collection

Georg Baselitz

1938–2026 · Painting, sculpture and printmaking

Georg Baselitz (1938–2026) was a German-Austrian painter, sculptor and printmaker who from 1969 painted his subjects upside down. He received the Praemium Imperiale in 2004, and Tate holds his work.

In the collection

About the artist

Georg Baselitz was born Hans-Georg Bruno Kern on 23 January 1938 in Deutschbaselitz, Saxony, in what later became East Germany (Wikipedia). He was expelled from the art school in East Berlin for 'sociopolitical immaturity' and continued his studies in West Berlin, where he took the surname Baselitz after his birthplace (Wikipedia; White Cube).

In 1969 he began painting his subjects upside down, to stress the artifice of painting over its content, and this became a defining feature of his later work (Wikipedia). He made his first etchings in 1964 at Schloss Wolfsburg, and printmaking remained part of his practice from then on; the Kunstmuseum Basel staged the first retrospective of his drawings and graphic work in 1970 (Wikipedia). Avanti (2016), the woodcut in the Joseph Clark Collection, was produced with the artist as a Fondation Beyeler Art Edition of 50, printed from a single block in black over a yellow tinted plate (Fondation Beyeler).

His honours include the Goslarer Kaiserring in 1986 and the Praemium Imperiale in 2004, and he was made an honorary member of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1999 (Wikipedia). The Centre Pompidou held a retrospective in 2021 (Wikipedia). He lived in Salzburg from 2013, took Austrian citizenship in 2015 and died on 30 April 2026, aged 88 (Wikipedia).

Sources

  1. Wikipedia
  2. Wikidata
  3. White Cube
  4. Fondation Beyeler
  5. Tate
  6. Gagosian

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