His outstanding artistic production, which has repeatedly found new artistic paths to challenge and continue art historical tradition since the 1960s, has made Georg Baselitz one of the most prominent representatives of contemporary German art. With his vigorous representational works, he violates established categories and repeatedly challenges our traditional understanding of art. In his famous Heldenbilder (“Hero Paintings,” 1965/66), Baselitz staged physically and emotionally broken figures monumentally on canvas, relentlessly confronting post-war German society with its painful past. After these anti-heroes, he made the “Fraktur” (Fracture) pictures (1966-1968) towards the end of the 1960s, which likewise contain a destructive element as they deconstruct and fragment the pictorial object.
Baselitz has collected prints since 1965, predominantly from the Renaissance, Mannerism, and Baroque periods. Their wealth of motifs and inventiveness always quenched his immense thirst for novelty. Through decontextualization and distortion, he brings their pictorial themes, such as the portrait, into the present with new content and contemporary impulses. This way, Baselitz generates enigmatically associative pictorial content that is never fully accessible to the viewer. [EH]