Hans-Georg Kern was born on 23 January 1938 in Deutschbaselizt and in 1961 he took the name of this East German town and adopted it as his artistic surname.
In 1956, he enrolled at the Faculty of Fine and Applied Arts in East Berlin, from where he was expelled after two semesters for “social and political immaturity”, so he moved to West Berlin to complete his studies.
During the 1960s, Baselitz began to develop his style, the first distinctive feature of which was the inversion of his motifs, painting figures in an inverted or upside-down position for the first time in 1969. This technique earned him a great deal of attention and criticism from the art community. His distinctive style consisted not only of inverted figures but also of an aggressive and expressive style in which his works are characterised by the strength of their colour and line.
In 1980, together with the artist Anselm Kiefer, he exhibited his first wooden sculpture in the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. In the 1980s he took part in various group exhibitions at institutions such as the Royal Academy of Arts in London, the Whitechapel Art Gallery, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Kunstmuseum in Basel, which brought him great visibility and recognition.
The paintings Baselitz produced between 1990 and 2010 marked a new shift in his work, showing a more linear and abstract approach to figuration. In the Remix series (2005-2008), Baselitz revisited his previous works, graphically representing his subjects in such a way that their subtle meanings and technical innovations became more explicit. In 2015, his Avignon paintings (2014), a set of eight imposing nude self-portraits, were presented at the Venice Biennale.
To commemorate the artist’s eightieth birthday in 2018, solo exhibitions were held at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC, and the Musée Unterlinden in Colmar, France. In 2019 he was elected a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris and became the first living artist to have an exhibition at the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice, followed by his first major retrospective to date at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2021.
The Hortensia Herrero collection has two works by Baselitz: a painting, in which the figures, curiously, are not inverted, and the iconic sculpture Bündel (2015), representing some high heels made in bronze, although we can see the traces of the artist’s hand in the wood that he worked first with an axe and then with a chainsaw before casting it in bronze. This sculpture was shown in the exhibition Georg Baselitz: Archinto, held at the Palazzo Grimani Museum during the 2022 Venice Biennale.
