Georg Baselitz, born Hans-Georg Kern in 1938, has died at age 88. The German painter and sculptor, who changed his name in 1961, built a career on aesthetic dissent. Expelled from art school in East Berlin, he first gained notoriety with a 1963 exhibition at Galerie Werner and Katz in Berlin, where two works were seized for obscenity. His signature gesture—inverting his images, beginning with "Der Wald auf dem Kopf" in 1969—became his most recognizable trademark, shifting focus from subject to the act of painting itself. Baselitz also produced significant sculptures, often carved with a chainsaw and axe, and his work was the subject of major retrospectives at the Centre Pompidou (2021-2022) and the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris (2011-2012).
Baselitz's death marks the end of a pivotal chapter in postwar German art. His defiant, tension-filled approach—oscillating between figuration and abstraction, and between homage and sabotage of his influences (Munch, Dix, de Kooning)—made him a central, if unclassifiable, figure in neo-expressionism. His practice of revisiting and remixing his own earlier works in the "Remix" series challenged conventional ideas of artistic legacy. With major holdings in French public collections (twenty works at the Centre Pompidou, eight at the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris), his impact on contemporary painting and sculpture is profound and enduring.