Georg Baselitz - This summer Amberg stands on its head

Georg Baselitz is one of the most important artists of our time. In the 1960s, he shook up post-war Germany with radical, expressive paintings. When he turned his pictorial motifs upside down starting in 1969, this brought him his international breakthrough.
Today, Baselitz has ranked at the top of the most sought-after contemporary artists for years. In the decades of his work, he has created an impressive body of work that has been and continues to be shown in almost all renowned museums around the world.

"Art is exclusively about the new, about renewal." - Georg Baselitz

The Exhibition in Amberg

With more than 100 graphic works, many of them in large format, the exhibition in Amberg provides an overview of 40 years of work.
The exhibition focuses on Baselitz's significant series in etching and woodcut, which are being shown for the first time ever in this compilation.
In the year of the artist's 85th birthday, it complements the series of top-class Baselitz exhibitions worldwide.

Trees, Women, Sleeping Dogs, Self-Portraits - Baselitz takes up a motif that is personally significant to him and uses it to impressively demonstrate the entire range of the medium of graphic art.
The series "Sing Sang Zero" as well as a few years later the series "Winterschlaf" convey the handling of sculpture in a rare and impressive way into the surface of the paper.
With the etchings "Ohne Hose in Avignon", a full-figure view into the mirror, the artist fixes the dialogue with his colleague and predecessor Pablo Picasso in a large format.

Georg Baselitz - Why are his motifs upside down?

It is his identifying mark  and also his recipe for success. But what motivated Georg Baselitz in 1969 to paint his pictures upside down? It is important to know that the pictures are not turned afterwards, but Baselitz paints them upside down. If one turns these paintings upside down, that is, into the seemingly correct position, the pictorial composition disintegrates.

At the end of the 60s, Baselitz no longer wanted to work purely representationally. He didn't want abstraction either. He wanted to reposition himself - to create something new, to achieve a change in the way he painted. Turning his pictorial motifs upside down enabled him to strip representationalism of its meaning without lapsing into the arbitrariness of abstraction.

For Baselitz, it is not the "what" that counts, but the "how."

"The inversion of the motif gave me the freedom to concentrate entirely on color and composition." - Georg Baselitz

FLYER FOR THE EXHIBITION
Follows shortly

Photo of the print "Mit Schatten", 2004
© Georg Baselitz and Knust & Kunz Gallery Editions, 2023