New Walk Museum and Art Gallery are proud to present the work of Georg Baselitz. The work on show here spans three decades from the nineteen-sixties to the nineties. There are print works, major paintings and large carved sculptures that give a broad overview of the artist’s oeuvre.

George Baselitz is one of the most important painters in the world today and perhaps Germany’s most significant living artist. The artist has been controversial since his first exhibition was closed by the police for obscenity. This reputation continues to this day.

This body of work includes the first showing of two key works from the Artist Rooms collection, unseen since they were gifted to Tate and National Galleries of Scotland by Anthony d’Offay in 2008. This exhibition gives an opportunity to see major works by one of the world’s greatest artists.

At the heart of this exhibition will be a major learning program helping us to explore this controversial artist and express our opinions of his work through digital media and performance.

Georg Baselitz, born Hans-Georg Kern in Deutschbaselitz near Dresden (Saxony) in 1938, now lives and works between the Ammer lake (Bavaria) and Imperia (Liguria). He has been an influence on international art since 1960, his works developing in the arena of the reception of German expressionism on the one hand, and the lightness of American painting (Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning) on the other. His Helden [heroes] group, finger-paintings, fracture and Russian paintings, which focus on his German past are represented in almost all distinguished museum collections.

From the late 1960s, Baselitz demonstrated his premiss of visual insight taking priority over the subject by deliberately showing his works upside down. The result is a unique simultaneity of figuration and abstraction. This urge towards permanent variation and change is also evident in his late work. Since 2006 he has produced so-called remix paintings in which, with an unprecedented lightness of touch, he re-examines the iconography of his own historical works.