Georg Baselitz: The Last Decade
Georg Baselitz: The Last Decade, held at the Sabancı University Sakıp Sabancı Museum (SSM) and Akbank Sanat, features works by the German painter, printmaker, and sculptor Georg Baselitz, a prominent figure in contemporary art. At Akbank Sanat, visitors can explore a comprehensive selection of engravings created by the artist over the past decade. Simultaneously, the SSM hosts an exhibition showcasing nearly a hundred monumental paintings and sculptures across all its gallery spaces and the garden.
Georg Baselitz has profoundly influenced the international art world since the 1980s, forging a new identity for German art in the aftermath of the Second World War. His unique style, characterised by his practice of painting compositions upside down since 1969, seeks to decontextualize form and stand between abstraction and figuration, thereby revolutionising a once-traditional medium.
Baselitz’s prints are intimate and introspective, often focusing on the details in his paintings. His expressive brushstrokes become even more pronounced in his prints. “Printmaking is all about focus and clarity,” Baselitz explains. “Fast and with just a few scratches, light, almost frivolous, very modest, hidden on little sheets of white paper, there is this play of lines in a sketch that suggests the clear intention to do something for now and forever that really doesn’t serve the purpose of decorating parties and palaces or making a big deal of yourself by excelling at deception. Printmaking is intimate yet vivid, alive for both its own time and ours; it is immediate.”
About the artist
Georg Baselitz was born on 23 January 1938 as Hang-Georg Kern in Deutschbaselitz, Saxony. Following the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, his father was conscripted into the army, and the family took refuge near Dresden. Upon their return, they settled into an occupied country and in 1950, they moved to Kamenz, where Baselitz attended high school and began painting. In 1956, he enrolled at the Hochschule für bildende und angewandte Kunst [Academy of Fine and Applied Arts] in East Berlin, studying under Socialist Realist painter Walter Womacka and formalist Herbert Behrens-Hangeler. After being suspended for so-called ‘socio-political immaturity’, he moved to West Berlin and completed his education at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste [Academy of Fine Arts], studying under Hann Trier. In 1958, he permanently relocated to West Berlin and began sharing his life with fellow student, Elke Kretzschmar. Various exhibitions and trips over the next years exposed him to different artistic styles, like Expressionism, Abstract Expressionism, Lyrical Abstraction, and Dada. In 1961 he established the name Georg Baselitz, after his place of birth. He and Eugen Schönebeck co-authored their first ‘Pandämonisches Manifest’ [‘Pandemonic Manifesto’], expressing their unconventional and unapologetic attitude towards contemporary art. In 1963, he graduated and held his first solo show at Galerie Werner & Katz, which caused a scandal and resulted in the confiscation of two paintings. Invited to the print workshop at Schloss Wolfsburg, Baselitz created his first prints in the spring of 1964. In 1965, he won a scholarship to the Villa Romana, spending six months in Florence, where he immersed himself in Renaissance art and collected Mannerist paintings.
In 1969, with the painting Der Wald auf dem Kopf [The Wood on its Head], he began his practice of depicting his subject matter upside down. This inversion of imagery marked a significant turning point in Baselitz's artistic career, as it challenged traditional perceptions and emphasised the materiality of painting. He presented his first sculpture, Modell für eine Skulptur [Model for a Sculpture]at the German Pavilion of the 39th Venice Biennale in 1980, returning to exhibit at the Biennale’s International Pavilion in 1993 and at the Arsenale in 2015. In the following decades, he has continued to explore themes of identity, history, and memory, often drawing from his personal experiences and the broader context of post-war Germany.
Baselitz has exhibited widely, including major solo shows at the Kunsthaus Zürich, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., the Nationalgalerie in Berlin, the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, the Royal Academy of Arts in London, the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Korea, and the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, solidifying his status as one of the most influential and provocative artists of his generation. He became the first living artist to have an exhibition at the Gallerie dell’Accademia, in Venice in 2019, which was followed in 2021 by his largest retrospective to date at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. In 2022, to mark his eighty-fifth birthday, the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna showed a dialogue with masterpieces from their collection in the exhibition titled Nackte Meister [Naked Masters], and an exhibition of his sculptures was on display at the Serpentine Galleries in London.
Today, Georg Baselitz lives and works between Ammersee (Germany), Salzburg (Austria), and Imperia (Italy).