Georg Baselitz

Hans Georg Kern, better known as Georg Baselitz, was born in 1938 in Deutschbaselitz, Germany. From 1956 to 1957, Baselitz studied at East Berlin’s Hochschule für Bildende und Angewandte Künste. He then relocated to West Berlin where he attended the Hochschule für Bildende Künste. In 1963, he had a solo exhibition at the Galerie Werner & Katz, where his paintings caused a scandal because of their provocative and sexually offensive motifs, which led to the confiscation of several paintings. In 1969, he began to turn his subjects upside down to force the viewer to focus on the painting instead of the subject matter. In 1980, he began to create sculptures using wood and a chainsaw to carve them. Most notably, he exhibited a sculpture in the German pavilion at the 1980 Venice biennale. His work has recently been shown in a retrospective at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.