Georg Baselitz

Georg Baselitz was born in 1938 in Deutschbaselitz in Saxony. He works as a painter, graphic designer and sculptor on the Ammersee in Bavaria, in the Salzburg region and in Imperia on the Italian Riviera.

After studying painting in East and West Berlin, in 1963 — his graduation year — he had his first exhibition in the Berlin gallery Werner & Katz, which caused a scandal. Since 1969 he has become known worldwide for paintings featuring upside-down motifs. Among other exhibitions, he participated in documenta 5 in Kassel in 1972. The State Gallery of Modern Art in Munich gave him a major retrospective in 1976. In 1980 he exhibited his first sculpture, Modell für eine Skulptur, in the German Pavilion of the Venice Biennale.

His work is held in leading international collections and museums. Important retrospectives of his oeuvre have taken place at venues including New York’s Guggenheim Museum (1995), the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris (1996 and 2011), the Royal Academy of Arts in London (2007), the Fondation Beyeler in Basel (2018), the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D. C., and, in 2021, at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

To celebrate the artist’s 85th birthday, the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna created a visual dialogue between his work and Old Masters from its collection, entitled Baselitz — Nackte Meister.

In 2022, at the invitation of the Vienna Musikverein and in collaboration with Wien Modern, he curated the series ‘Musikverein Perspektiven’, in which two compositions by Elisabeth Harnik and Olga Neuwirth, dedicated to him, received their world premieres.

He created the set designs for Harrison Birtwistle’s Punch and Judy at the Dutch National Opera in Amsterdam (1993), György Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre at Theater Chemnitz (2013) and Richard Wagner’s Parsifal at the Munich Opera Festival of the Bavarian State Opera (2018).

Georg Baselitz taught at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe from 1978 for several years, and at the University of the Arts in Berlin until 2003.

His numerous awards include the Praemium Imperiale in Tokyo (2004) and the Austrian Decoration for Science and Art (2005). In 2019 he was elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts of the Institut de France in Paris.

In 2015 he became an Austrian citizen.