GEORG BASELITZ (HANS GEORG KERN)
Deutschbaselitz (Alemania), 1938

In 1956 he started studying at the Hochschule für bildende und angewandte Kunst in East Berlin, subsequently transferring to the Hochschule für bildende Künste in West Berlin. He went to live in Berlin in 1958, and there he received his first influences of an abstract nature through Malevich and Kandinsky, the American Expressionists and Art Brut. Using a style close to Art Brut, in 1961 he exhibited in Paris with Eugen Schönebeck, with whom he wrote a first version of the “Pandämonisches Manifest”. In 1963 his first solo exhibition, at the Galerie Werner & Katz in Berlin, was partially censored because of the explicit nature of the figuration. He modified his style substantially after seeing Mannerist painting in Italy in 1965. After a brief transition, in 1966 he did his first engravings and paintings of fractured images (Fraktur-Bilder). Their increasing compositional complexity became a kaleidoscopic structure with which he succeeded in uniting figuration and a visual “all-over” approach in a single style. This tendency towards a fusion of representation and abstraction also applied to the inverted works that he began in 1969, which expressed themes closely connected with cultural and artistic traditions of Germanic origin (eagles, landscapes, flags). The pictures that he painted with his hands in 1972 indicate the vehement course taken by his work during this decade, when his first retrospective was held in Munich (1976). In 1977 he began teaching at the Staatliche Akademie der bildenden Künste (moving to the Akademie der Künste in Berlin in 1983), at a point when the adoption of a monumental format coincided with a greater abstraction in his paintings. In 1979 he made his first sculptures in wood, in an anti-classical language intimately linked with a northern spirit. These works were presented the following year at the Biennale di Venezia, providing a central focus for his activity in the early eighties, when his work was regularly exhibited in London, Paris and New York. A shift towards the German Expressionism of the beginning of the century led him to a painting style with strong chromatic contrasts, which he maintained during the nineties, together with a very gestural handling. In 1996 the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum organised a major exhibition of his work, which subsequently travelled to Los Angeles, Washington and Berlin.