The German artist Georg Baselitz, whose expressive paintings and sculptures stirred controversy before winning global acclaim, has died aged 88. The Thaddaeus Ropac gallery, which had a longstanding professional relationship with the artist, confirmed his death on Thursday, stating that he had “defined German visual art for a generation” and died peacefully.
Baselitz, born Hans-Georg Kern, was among Germany’s most prominent contemporary visual artists, with a body of work spanning six decades. Like his peers Gerhard Richter and Anselm Kiefer, his works grappled with the traumas of German history and questions of collective guilt. He told Der Spiegel in 2013: “All German painters have neuroses when it comes to Germany’s past… my paintings are battles.”
In 1969 he began painting canvases upside down, a technique he used to find a path between abstraction and figurative art. This method yielded a series of paintings of eagles, the emblem of both the Third Reich and postwar Germany. One such painting caught the eye of then-chancellor Gerhard Schröder, who hung it behind his desk in the chancellery.
Baselitz also worked as a sculptor. At the 1980 Venice Biennale, he exhibited a wooden figure carved with an axe and chainsaw, which appeared to perform a Nazi salute. He later said he never intended that reference, having been inspired by an artefact from Burkina Faso. He spent his early childhood in Nazi Germany and grew up in East Germany, moving to West Berlin in 1957. He adopted the name Baselitz in 1961 as a nod to his birthplace.
He achieved international breakthrough in the early 1980s and was among the highest-priced living German painters. Known for his trenchant opinions, he once said “women don’t paint very well” in a 2013 interview, though he later withdrew some statements and expressed admiration for Tracey Emin and Artemisia Gentileschi.
