Georg Baselitz

Georg Baselitz was born in Deutschbaselitz, Saxony, in 1938. He works as a painter, printmaker and sculptor at the Ammersee in Bavaria, near Salzburg, Austria, and in Imperia on the Italian Riviera. After studying painting in East and West Berlin, he had his first exhibition at the Berlin Galerie Werner & Katz in 1963, which provoked a scandal. From 1969 onwards, he became known worldwide for his upside-down paintings. He participated in documenta 5 in Kassel in 1972, amongst other. The Staatsgalerie moderner Kunst in Munich showed his first major retrospective in 1976. In 1980, he presented his first sculptural work ‘Model for a Sculpture’ in the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.
Major retrospectives of his work have been held at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1995, the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1996 and 2011, the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in 2007, the Fondation Beyeler in Basel and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C. in 2018 and at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, in 2021.
To mark his 85th birthday, the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna presented Naked Masters, a dialogue with his work and old masterpieces from the collection.

He has been a professor at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Karlsruhe (from 1978) and at the Hochschule der Künste Berlin (until 2003).
Among many other honours, he received the Praemium Imperiale in Tokyo in 2004 and in 2019 he was elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts, Institut de France in Paris. In 2005 he was awarded the Austrian Decoration of Honour for Science and Art, and received Austrian citizenship in 2015.

His work is represented in major international collections and museums.

He was invited by the Musikverein Wien, in cooperation with Wien Modern, to curate the series ‘Musikverein Perspektiven’ for 2022, in which two compositions by Elisabeth Harnik and Olga Neuwirth dedicated to him were premiered.
He has designed stage sets for De Nederlandse Opera in Amsterdam (1993, Punch and Judy by Harrison Birtwistle), for Theater Chemnitz (2013, Le Grand Macabre by György Ligeti) and the Bavarian State Opera in Munich (2018 Opera Festival, Parsifal by Richard Wagner).