Georg Baselitz

The First Book With All of George Baselitz's Sculptures

Georg Baselitz, born Hans-Georg Kern in Deutschbaselitz, Saxony, in 1939, continuously contravenes set categories and regularities in his work. The manifold meanings of his works, the allusions and pictorial references to art history, contemporary history and biography, the ironic distance and the eagerness to experiment emphasize how he ceaselessly rethinks and reinvents his painting. In sculpture, in which Baselitz first began to work in 1979, he fights against harmony and symmetry just as he does in his paintings. Much like the painter Baselitz accords the greatest possible freedom to the individual brushstrokes in his paintings, the sculptor Baselitz works the wood with a chain saw, hatchet and chisel. The raw feats of strength create abrupt lines, notches and incisions in the sculpture. Sculpture, the artist has said, is a shorter path than painting to express the same problem, since sculpture is more primitive, more brutal and more unconditional. The lively evocative power of the creative means is much more directly legible and much less encoded in the medium of sculpture.