Georg Baselitz: Feet First

Floor 3

Big upside-down paintings, wooden sculptures hacked out with axes and chainsaws, fragments of a ruined post-war Germany, and the ghost of Edvard Munch. The confrontational art of the internationally renowned German artist Georg Baselitz contains all of this and more.

Featuring over 80 paintings, drawings and sculptures, ranging from the early 1960s to recent works, Feet First is the most extensive exhibition of Baselitz’s work ever mounted in Norway.

Baselitz’s subjects include the human figure in many different forms, haunting landscapes from his childhood, fragments of national symbolism, and in more recent years, his own ageing process. In 1969 he began painting subjects upside down as a way of emphasising the abstract, purely painterly qualities in his figurative images.

A central theme of this exhibition is Baselitz’s lifelong fascination with the art of Edvard Munch. In a number of images, Baselitz makes various references to Munch’s work, and credits him as a key influence in the development of modern German art. Despite the heaviness of his subject matter, Baselitz approaches Munch and other works from art history with a playful spirit.

About Georg Baselitz:

Baselitz was born in 1938 in Hitler’s Germany, which was already on the path to the Second World War that left Europe in ruins. The experience of being born into a ‘destroyed order’ has remained a central theme of Baselitz’s art, from the beginning of his career in the early 1960s onwards. With the growing international interest in German art in the 1980s, Baselitz became one of the biggest names on the global contemporary art scene. He is known for the artistic power of his images, as well as his provocative statements on art, gender and politics.