Georg Baselitz, born in 1938 in Deutschbaselitz, Saxony, is one of the major figures of post-war German painting. Growing up in a Germany marked by defeat, division, and collective guilt, he forged early on a body of work deeply rooted in the history and traumatic memory of his country. Trained in East Berlin and then West Berlin, he established himself in the 1960s with a radical, expressive, and deliberately provocative style of painting, breaking with the aesthetic and ideological canons of his time.

From 1969 onwards, Baselitz adopted a now emblematic technique: the representation of inverted figures. By reversing his motifs, he diverted attention from the subject matter to emphasize the painting itself, the gesture, the material, and the pictorial structure. Dislocated bodies, tormented faces, and fragmented landscapes convey an obsessive reflection on German identity, the violence of history, and the fragility of humankind.

His dense and rugged painting is characterized by a dark palette, powerful impasto, and a raw energy that lends his works an almost physical intensity. Rejecting any decorative complacency, Baselitz championed a tragic and visceral figuration. A member of the Berlin Academy of Arts, he remained an independent and solitary artist whose work profoundly renewed contemporary figuration and left a lasting mark on European art.