The painter, sculptor and printmaker Georg Baselitz has died, age 88.
Baselitz was born Hans-Georg Kern in Deutschbaselitz, Saxony in 1938. In 1945, at the age of seven, he witnessed the bombing of Dresden. The visions of destruction he saw during the war would stay with him throughout his artistic career.
After he was expelled from the Academy of Fine and Applied Arts in East Berlin in 1957, he joined the Academy of Art in West Berlin, where he changed his surname to Baselitz after his city of birth.
Looking for alternatives to Eastern-bloc socialist realism and Western abstraction, Baselitz found inspiration in Art Brut, Dada, Surrealism and Existentialist literature. In 1963, his first solo exhibition was considered obscene and his work was confiscated by West German authorities. In 1969, with Der Wald auf dem Kopf (The Wood on Its Head), he made his first upside down painting, a gesture that became emblematic of his work.
Baselitz rose to international fame in the late 1970s and 80s as a major figure of neo-expressionism. In 1980, he represented Germany alongside Anselm Kiefer at the Venice Biennale, where he showed his first sculpture. The piece, typical of his later wooden sculptural works shaped with a chainsaw, was controversial due to its raised arm reminiscent of a Nazi salute.
The artist continued to work until the end of his life. From 6 May to 21 September, the Fondazione Giorgio Cini will show his most recent series of paintings in Venice.
