Georg Baselitz, Bildzweiunddreißig, 1994, 290 x 450 cm, Gold leaf and oil on canvas, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, © Georg Baselitz, 2009.

Georg Baselitz, Wacholderbüsche und Steine, 1970, 200 x 250 cm, water based paint on canvas, Private Collection, © Georg Baselitz, 2009.

Georg Baselitz, Fertigbetonwerk, 1970, 200 x 250cm, oil on canvas, Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden, © Georg Baselitz, 2009.

Georg Baselitz, Mann auf rotem Kopfkissen, 1982, 250 x 250 cm, oil on canvas, Collection Froehlich, Stuttgart, © Georg Baselitz, 2009.

Georg Baselitz, Der Hirte, 1966, oil on canvas, 163 x 130,7 cm, Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden, © Georg Baselitz, 2009.

Georg Baselitz, Frau Ultramarin, 2004, 295,5 x 94 x 107 cm, oil on cedar wood, Sammlung Heiner Friedrich, © Georg Baselitz, 2009.

Georg Baselitz, Ekely, 2004, 250 x 200 cm, oil on canvas, Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden, © Georg Baselitz, 2009.

Georg Baselitz, Volk Ding Zero, 2009, 308 x 120 x 125 cm, oil on cedar wood, paper, nails, Privatsammlung, © Georg Baselitz, 2009.

Georg Baselitz, G.-Kopf, 1987, 99 x 65,6 x 58,5 cm, oil on red beech. Ludwig Museum Budapest, © Georg Baselitz, 2009.

Museum Frieder Burda
Lichtentaler Allee 8 b
(00)49–(0)7221–39898-0
Baden-Baden
Baselitz. A Retrospective
November 21, 2009-
March 14, 2010

Museum Frieder Burda and Baden-Baden’s Staatliche Kunsthalle is exhibiting a comprehensive survey of the German artist Georg Baselitz, featuring approximately 140 works. Baselitz. A Retrosepctive is presented at the two neighbouring museums, with the Museum Frieder Burda displaying “50 years of painting” and the Staatliche Kunsthalle “30 years of sculpture”. The show is to be curated by the artist Georg Baselitz himself, along with Götz Adriani from the Museum Frieder Burda and Karola Kraus from the Staatliche Kunsthalle.

Georg Baselitz is one of the world’s most famous and sought after contemporary artists. It is thanks to artists such as Georg Baselitz, that German Painting has developed its current, unprecedented reputation. For many years now, Baselitz’s works have been found in nearly all the important museums and collections worldwide. His personal exhibitions, from the exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1995, to the exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 2007, have generated broad public interest.

50 years of painting
at Museum Frieder Burda
The Museum Frieder Burda continues a series of exhibitions based on loans from important private collections that began with the Sigmar Polke show in 2007, and continued with the Gerhard Richter exhibition in 2008. The retrospective of Georg Baselitz’s work is predominantly displaying loans from the internationally renowned private collections of Josef Froehlich, Sylvia and Ulrich Ströher, Friedrich Christian Flick, Uli Knecht and Frieder Burda as well as 15 works owned by Georg Baselitz. Featuring around 80 paintings and 40 works on paper, from early figurative to recent works, the exhibition provides a unique opportunity to consider Georg Baselitz’s achievements over five decades.

During his 50 years of activity, Georg Baselitz has produced a large and varied body of work, opening up new paths and establishing new artistic standards. The ‘Hero’ paintings of the mid-1960s consist of confusing figures portrayed in a monumental, heroic style, challenging the classical portrait painting. A total of nine examples of this famous series are on display at the Museum Frieder Burda. The dissolution of forms in 1966 leads up to Baselitz’s ‘Fracture’ paintings, in which the motifs are taken apart and then re-composed. This liberation from the depiction of content and meaning climaxes in 1969 with the so-called ‘upside down’ paintings. Figures, portraits, still life paintings, landscapes, animal representations – all are painted on their head, thus proving Baselitz’s delight in experimentation and establishing his worldwide reputation.

30 years of sculpture at Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden
The exhibition at the Staatliche Kunsthalle entitled “30 years of sculpture” focuses on the artist’s sculptural work. In each of the nine sky-lighted exhibition halls, works from nine different periods are presented, starting with 1979’s Modell für eine Skulptur — Baselitz’s first sculpture — and continuing through to his latest sculpture Volk Ding Zero. Sculptures with direct correlation to particular paintings are displayed in juxtaposition to them. Much as the painter Baselitz prefers a liberated way of painting with regard to content and brushwork, the sculptor Baselitz employs an elemental and unpolished technique for his carvings, utilizing chainsaw, axe and chisel. His sculptures, as his paintings, reject all forms of harmony and symmetry. The jagged lines express a rigorous willfulness which is intentionally manifested in a rude display of force. Each figure is a product of this raw forcefulness and derives its unmistakeable appearance from it. Baselitz began sculpting in 1979, when he came to the conviction that sculpture could translate the power of representation in a more direct way than painting, and that its language was easier to decode.

His early sculptures, though invoking the human form, do not recall specific people but are carriers of artistic concepts. Being aggressively hewn from maple, lime, red beech or cedar tree trunks without any technical elegance, Baselitz’s sculptures often give the viewer the impression of looking at ‘”wounded figures."

Georg Baselitz (born January 23, 1938) studied in the former East Germany, before moving to what was then the country of West Germany. Baselitz's style is classified by some as Neo-Expressionist, but from a European perspective, it is seen more as postmodern.

His career was kick-started in the 1960s after police action against one of his paintings, (Die große Nacht im Eimer), because of its provocative, offending sexual nature.

Baselitz is one of the world's best-selling living artists. He is a professor at the renowned Hochschule der Künste in Berlin.

Born as Hans-Georg Kern in Deutschbaselitz (now a part of Kamenz, Saxony), in what was later to be East Germany. His father was an elementary school teacher and the family lived in the local schoolhouse. Baselitz first encountered art in albums of 19th-century pencil drawings in the school library. He also assisted nature photographer Helmut Drechsler on occasional ornithological shoots.

In his early life, his family moved to the county town of Kamenz. Baselitz attended the local school, in the assembly hall of which hangs a reproduction of the 1859 painting Wermsdorfer Wald by Louis-Ferdinand von Rayski. He read the writings of Jakob Böhme. At the ages of 14 and 15, he painted portraits, religious subjects, still lifes and landscapes, some in a futuristic style. In 1955, he applied to study at the Kunstakademie in Dresden but was rejected. In 1956, he passed the entrance exam to study forestry at the Forstschule in Taranth and successfully applied to study at the Hochschule für bildende und angewandte Kunst in East Berlin. He studied painting under professors Walter Womacka and Herbert Behrens-Hangler, and befriended Peter Graf and Ralf Winkler (later known as A. R. Penck). After two semesters, he was expelled for "sociopolitical immaturity." The next year he successfully applied for a place at West Berlin's Hochschule der Künste and continued his studies in the class of Professor Hann Trier. He immersed himself in the theories of Ernst-Wilhelm Nay, Wassily Kandinsky and Kasimir Malevich. During this time he became friends with Eugen Schönebeck and Benjamin Katz.

In 1958, after moving from East Berlin to West Berlin, Baselitz met his future wife, Elke Kretzschmar. He also produced his first original works in a distinct style of his own, among them the imaginary portraits Uncle Bernhard/ Onkel Bernhard. In the same year, he started work on the Rayski-Head/ Rayski-Kopf series. In 1961, he adopted the name Georg Baselitz in a tribute to his home town. In the same year, he was admitted to the Hann Trier master class. In 1962, he married Elke Kretzschmar and they had a son named Daniel. He also completed his studies at the Akademie. In 1963, Baselitz's first solo exhibition at Galerie Werner & Katz, Berlin, caused a public scandal. Two of the pictures, The Big Night Down The Drain / Die große Nacht im Eimer (1962/63) and the Naked Man / Nackter Mann (1962), were seized by the public prosecutor. The ensuing court case did not end until 1965.

Baselitz spent the spring of 1964 at Schloß Wolfsburg and produced his first etchings in the printing shop there, which were exhibited later that year. The next year, he won a six-month scholarship to study at the Villa Romana in Florence. While there, he studied Mannerist graphics and produced the Animal Piece / Tierstück pictures. After returning to WeAst Berlin, he worked until 1966 on the Heroes / Helden group, which includes the large-format composition The Great Friends / Die großen Freunde. In 1966, his second son, Anton, was born, and the family moved to Osthofen, near Worms. Through early 1969, he produced further large-format Foresters / Waldarbeiter pictures. In 1969, using Wermsdorfer Wald by Louis-Ferdinand von Rayski as a model, he painted his first picture to feature an inverted motif, The Wood On Its Head / Der Wald auf dem Kopf.

In the 1970s, Baselitz exhibited regularly at Munich's Galerie Heiner Friedrich. Most of the works he produced during this time were landscapes themed as pictures-within-a-picture. In 1970, at the Kunstmuseum Basel, Dieter Koepplin staged the first retrospective of drawings and graphic works by Baselitz. At the Galeriehaus in Cologne's Lindenstraße, Franz Dahlem puts on the first exhibition of pictures with upside-down motifs. In 1971, the Baselitz family once again moved, relocating to Forst an der Weinstraße. Georg used the old village school as studio and started painting pictures featuring bird motifs. He exhibited several times in the next few years around Germany. He also participated in the 1972 documenta 5 in Kassel. This same year he began using a fingerpainting technique. He then began painting landscapes until 1975, chiefly based on motifs from around Deutschbaselitz. In 1975, the family moved to Derneburg, near Hildesheim. Baselitz visited New York for the first time and worked there for two weeks. He also visited Brazil, participating in the 13th Biennale in São Paulo.

In 1976, Baselitz set up an additional studio in Florence, which he used until 1981. In 1977, he began working on large-format linocuts. He began teaching at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Karlsruhe, where he is appointed professor in 1978. From 1978 until 1980, he worked on diptychs using the tempera painting technique (combinations of motifs), multipart pictures (series of motifs), and large-format individual works such as The Corn Gleaner / Die Ährenleserin, Woman Clearing Away Rubble / Trümmerfrau, Eagle / Adler and Boy Reading / Der lesende Knabe. The works become more abstract, with scriptural elements predominating. In 1980, he showed his first sculpture at the Venice Biennale.

In 1981, Baselitz set up an addition study in Castiglione Florentino, near Arezzo, which he uses until 1987. His work is exhibited in New York for the first time in 1981. By 1982, he began devoting more time to sculpture, in addition to several exhibitions. In 1983, he began using Christian motifs in much of his artwork, and completed the major composition Dinner in Dresden / Nachtessen in Dresden. In the same year, he took up a new professorship at the Hochschule der Künste Berlin. In 1986, in recognition of Baselitz's achievements, he was awarded the Kaiserring by the city of Goslar. Through the 1980s, Baselitz's work was exhibited frequently in Germany. In 1989, the title Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres was conferred upon Baselitz by French Minister of Arts Jack Lang.

In 1990, at the Nationalgalerie im Alten Museum in Berlin, the first major exhibition of Baselitz's works in East Germany was staged. In 1992, he resigned from the Akademie der Künste in Berlin. In 1993, he designed the set for Harrison Birtwistle's opera Punch and Judy, staged under the direction of Pierre Audi at the Dutch Opera in Amsterdam. He also took part in the International Pavilion at the Venice Biennale with the Male Torso / Männlicher Torso sculpture, accompanied by oversized drawings. In 1994, Baselitz designed a stamp for the French postal service. He also produced his first ground gold picture that year. In 1995, the first major retrospective of Baselitz's work in the U.S. is staged at the Guggenheim in New York City. The retrospective was also exhibited in Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles. Throughout the 1990s, his work was exhibited frequently throughout Europe. In 2002, a retrospective of Baselitz's work was shown in the art gallery of Yap? Kredi Bank in Istanbul.

Baselitz currently lives and works near Munich and in Imperia. He recently sold his castle in Derneburg.

There was also a recent exhibition of his work in London, at the Royal Academy of Arts in late 2007, and in the White Cube gallery in 2009.

In the 1970s, Baselitz was part of a group of Neo-Expressionist German artists, occasionally identified as “Neue Wilden,” focusing on deformation, the power of subject and the vibrancy of the colors. He became famous for his upside-down images, he is seen as a revolutionary painter as he draws the viewer’s attention to his works by making them think and sparking their interest. The subjects of the paintings don’t seem to be as significant as the work’s visual insight. Through out his career, Baselitz has varied his style, ranging from layering substances to his style, since the 1990s, which focuses more on lucidity and smooth changes.

Georg Baselitz, ohne Titel (Wald), 1974, 217,3 x 113,7 cm, oil on canvas, Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden, © Georg Baselitz, 2009.

Georg Baselitz, Adler, Januar 1982, 200 x 250,5 cm, oil on canvas, Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden, © Georg Baselitz, 2009.

Georg Baselitz, Armenischer Teppich (Aslamazyan) [Armenian Carpet ((Aslamazyan)], 1999. Oil on canvas, 162 x 130 cm,, private collection, courtesy Jamileh Weber Gallery, Zürich, © Georg Baselitz.

Georg Baselitz. Woman of Dresden – Karla, 1990. Ash and tempera, 157 x 67.5 x 44 cm. Froehlich Collection, Stuttgart. Photo © Jochen Littkemann © Georg Baselitz.

Royal Academy of Arts
Piccadilly
London
+44 020 7300 8000
Main Galleries
Georg Baselitz
September 22-December 9, 2007

Featuring over 60 paintings together with a significant number of his drawings, prints and sculptures, the retrospective exhibition is a comprehensive survey of Baselitz’s work that documents a career of his most important works. These works come from over 30 lenders, mainly in Europe, and will therefore provide a unique opportunity to consider his achievement over five decades. Baselitz, who featured in a major way in the seminal 1981 exhibition A New Spirit in Painting at the Royal Academy, which introduced his work to a British audience, is an Honorary RA. This will be his first retrospective in England since the exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1983.

Born 1938 in Deutschbaselitz, Saxony, Georg Baselitz has been acclaimed as one of Germany’s most prolific and well-known artists. Baselitz is perhaps best known for painting his motifs upside down as a strategy to free the subject matter from its content. However, his early figurative work deals with existential problems of being in Germany at a period where abstraction largely holds sway. Aggressive and frequently disturbing, Baselitz’s work incorporates semi-abstract figures, animals and landscape within a canvas of colour and liberated brushwork. His works project a sense of hostility and isolation in a style that remains distinctive.

Painter, draftsman, printmaker and sculptor, Baselitz began studying painting at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in East Berlin in 1956 but was expelled after only one term because of ‘social-political immaturity’. After moving to West Berlin in 1956 Baselitz resumed his artistic studies in 1957 completing them in 1962.

Influenced in his early years by the artistic works and writings of influential artists and theorists such as Kandinsky, Malevich, Nietzsche, Baudelaire, Samuel Beckett and the French writer and artist Antonin Artaud, Baselitz later became deeply involved and inspired by art produced by the mentally ill and others at odds with society. His work has been equally informed by traditional African art, French and Italian Mannerist painting, printmaking of the sixteenth century as well as a profound sense of ornament and decoration.

The exhibition will commence with some of Baselitz’s earliest works, made around 1962, such as Die Große Nacht im Eimer (The Big Night Down the Drain) and the Hero paintings Der neue Typ (The New Type). This will be followed by outstanding examples of his Fracture paintings made at the end of the 1960s, leading up to the first so-called upside down paintings such as Der Mann am Baum, 1969 (The Man at the Tree). With this work, Baselitz found a new language that enabled him to combine principles of abstraction with those of realism as well as philosophically "standing the world on its head" which was to serve as a metaphor and ‘Leitmotiv’ for much of his subsequent art. The exhibition will also demonstrate his return recently to motifs explored in his early career. These are done in a more transparent linear manner, which he calls Remixes. There will be important sculptures in the exhibition, particularly Model for a Sculpture that was shown at the Venice Biennale in 1980 where it caused a considered sensation.

Georg Baselitz is curated by Norman Rosenthal, Exhibitions Secretary at the Royal Academy of Arts.

The exhibition will be accompanied by an extensively illustrated catalogue which will explore Baselitz’s development, revealing an artist whose concerns are derived from his experiences of post-war German society. The catalogue will include essays by Norman Rosenthal, Exhibitions Secretary at the RA, Richard Shiff, Professor of Art History at the University of Texas at Austin, Carla Schulz-Hoffmann, Chief Curator at the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich and Shulamith Behr, Senior Lecturer in German 20th century art at the Courtauld Institute of Art.

Georg Baselitz, Modell für eine Skulptur (Model for a Sculpture), 1979-80, Limewood and tempera, 178 x 147 x 244 cm., Ludwig museum, cologne, Photograph © rheinisches Bildarchiv, Cologne, © Georg Baselitz.

Georg Baselitz, Nachtessen in Dresden (Dinner in Dresden), 1983, Oil on canvas, 280 x 450 cm., Kunsthaus, Zürich, Photograph Frank Oleski, © Georg Baselitz.

Georg Baselitz, Untitled, 1966, woodcut, 2 blocks, 41,5 x 33,2 cm, Photo Martina Gadiot, Staatliche Graphische Sammlung München.

Georg Baselitz, Untitled, 1964/65, etching, soft ground on zinc, 33,2 x 24,7 cm, Photo Martina Gadiot, Staatliche Graphische Sammlung München.

Pinakothek der Moderne
Kunstareal München
Barer Strasse 40
+491089-23805-360
Münich
Georg Baselitz, Prints 1964-1983
October 1-November 23, 2008

As far back as the 1970s the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung München began collecting drawings and prints by Georg Baselitz. In 1972, in one of the first museum exhibitions, it showed works on paper by the artist. Twelve years later it organised a major exhibition of his early prints, which then went on tour to Geneva, Paris and London, among other venues.

The reason behind the current exhibition are more than 300 prints from the collection of Duke Franz von Bayern that, in collaboration with the State of Bavaria, have been donated to the Graphische Sammlung as a way of marking the institution’s 250th anniversary. This makes the Munich collection one of the most significant, comprehensive and complex collections of works by the artist. It is made up principally of trial prints and unique pieces of outstanding quality from the years 1964 to 1983.

Georg Baselitz — who celebrated his seventieth birthday in January, 2008 and who recently moved to Bavaria — discovered the medium of print early on in his career. His main focus has always lain not so much in the aspect of reproduction as in experimenting with possibilities of such diverse techniques as drypoint engraving, aquatinta, vernis mou and wood- and lino-cutting. By referring back to the motifs of his drawings and paintings, his prints have created an oeuvre that commands an independent position alongside his painted works. The prints allow the viewer to trace the developmental phases of well-established themes in the work of Baselitz.

The exhibition, which was previously held in the Dresden Kupferstich-Kabinett, presents a selection of over 150 works on paper demonstrating the creative process towards the final print. The presentation aims to reflect the workshop nature of the exhibition.

Curator of the exhibition is Michael Semff.

Georg Baselitz, Big head, 1966, woodcut, 2 blocks, 48,5 x 40,8 cm, Photo: Martina Gadiot, © Staatliche Graphische Sammlung München.

Georg Baselitz, Lenin on the Tribune, 1999, 250 x 200 cm, Öl auf Leinwand, Courtesy Galerie Thaddeus Ropac, Salzburg. © VG BILD-KUNST, Bonn 2007.

Georg Baselitz, Gertruds Hut II, 1998. 200 x 162 cm, Öl auf Leinwand, Courtesy Galerie Thaddeus Ropac, Salzburg. © VG BILD-KUNST, Bonn 2007. © Georg Baselitz.

Georg Baselitz, Victory Day in Berlin, 1999, 200 x 162 cm, Öl auf Leinwand, Coutesy Galerie Thaddeus Ropac, Privatsammlung / VG BILD-KUNST, Bonn 2007.

Georg Baselitz, À ta Santé, 2001, 153 x 114 cm, Öl auf Leinwand, Courtesy Galerie Thaddeus Ropac, Salzburg, © VG BILD-KUNST, Bonn 2007.

Georg Baselitz, Portrait des Mitglieds der Akademie I.P. Pawllow, 1999, 250 x 200 cm, Öl auf Leinwand, Courtesy Galerie Thaddeus Ropac, Salzburg,© VG BILD-KUNST, Bonn 2007.

Deichtorhallen Hamburg
Deichtorstraße 1-2
Hamburg
+49-(0)40-32-10-30
Georg Baselitz:
The Russian Paintings
November 16. 2007-
February 3, 2008

Georg Baselitz (born January 23, 1938) studied in the former East Germany, before moving to what was then the country of West Germany. Baselitz's style is interpreted in North America as Neo-Expressionist, but from a European perspective, it is seen more as postmodern.

Baselitz is viewed as an artist who has voraciously consumed — and altered — Western figurative styles from the recent and distant past.

On the occasion of Baselitz’ 70th birthday, the Deichtorhallen exhibits the series of Russian Paintings, which up till now have never been shown. With his paintings, which are turned upside down, he conquered the international art world. Between 1998 and 2005 Georg Baselitz — Germany’s most famous living artist — painted new pictures of socialist realism, which influenced him artistically as a youngster in the GDR through schoolbooks and magazines and left their mark on him, in a very free style. This series of large format paintings, shown for the first time in Germany, with themes of Lenin, Stalin, their propaganda, Russian-German history in the 20th century, and the question of realism in painting.

His career was kick-started in the 1960s after police action against one of his paintings, a self-portrait (Die große Nacht im Eimer) that depicted an underage boy masturbating.

Baselitz is also one of the world's best-selling living artists. He is a professor at the renowned Hochschule der Künste in Berlin.

Born Hans-Georg Kern in Deutschbaselitz, Saxony, in what was later East Germany. Baselitz' father was an elementary-school teacher and the family lived in the local schoolhouse. He first encountered art in albums of nineteenth-century pencil drawings in the school library. He also assisted nature photographer Helmut Drechsler on occasional ornithological shoots.

In his early life, his family moved to the county town of Kamenz. Baselitz attended the local school, in the assembly hall of which hangs a reproduction of the 1859 painting Wermsdorfer Wald by Louis-Ferdinand von Rayski. He read the writings of Jakob Böhme. At the ages of 14 and 15, he painted portraits, religious subjects, still lifes and landscapes, some in a futuristic style. In 1955, he applied to study at the Kunstakademie in Dresden but was rejected. In 1956, he passed the entrance exam to study forestry at the Forstschule in Taranth and successfully applied to study at the Hochschule für bildende und angewandte Kunst in East Berlin. He studied painting under professors Walter Womacka and Herbert Behrens-Hangler, and befriended Peter Graf and Ralf Winkler (later known as A. R. Penck). After two semesters, he was expelled for "sociopolitical immaturity." The next year he successfully applied for a place at West Berlin's Hochschule der Künste and continued his studies in the class of Professor Hann Trier. He immersed himself in the theories of Ernst-Wilhelm Nay, Wassily Kandinsky and Kasimir Malevich. During this time he became friends with Eugen Schönebeck and Benjamin Katz.

In 1958, after moving from East Berlin to West Berlin, Baselitz met his future wife, Elke Kretzschmar. He also produced his first original works in a distinct style of his own, among them the imaginary portraits "Uncle Bernhard"/ "Onkel Bernhard." In the same year, he started work on the "Rayski-Head"/ "Rayski-Kopf" series. In 1961, he adopted the name Georg Baselitz in a tribute to his home town. In the same year, he is admitted to the Hann Trier master class. In 1962, he married Elke Kretzschmar and they had a son named Daniel. He also completed his studies at the Akademie. In 1963, Baselitz's first solo exhibition at Galerie Werner & Katz, Berlin, caused a public scandal. Two of the pictures, The Big Night Down The Drain/ Die große Nacht im Eimer (1962/63) and the Naked Man/ Nackter Mann (1962), were seized by the public prosecutor. The ensuing court case did not end until 1965.

Basselitz spent the spring of 1964 at Schloß Wolfsburg and produced his first etchings in the printing shop there, which were exhibited later that year. The next year, he won a six-month scholarship to study at the Villa Romana in Florence. While there, he studied Mannerist graphics and produced the Animal Piece/Tierstück pictures. After returning to West Berlin, he worked until 1966 on the Hoes/Helden group, which includes the large-format composition The Great Friends/ Die großen Freunde. In 1966, his second son, Anton, was born, and the family moved to Osthofen, near Worms. Through early 1969, he produced further large-format Foresters/Waldarbeiter pictures. In 1969, using Wermsdorfer Wald by Louis-Ferdinand von Rayski as a model, he paints his first picture to feature an inverted motif, The Wood On Its Head/Der Wald auf dem Kopf.

In the 1970s, Baselitz exhibited regularly at Munich's Galerie Heiner Friedrich. Most of the works he produced during this time were landscapes themed as pictures-within-a-picture. In 1970, at the Kunstmuseum Basel, Dieter Koepplin staged the first retrospective of drawings and graphic works by Baselitz. At the Galeriehaus in Cologne's Lindenstraße, Franz Dahlem puts on the first exhibition of pictures with upside-down motifs. In 1971, the Baselitz family once again moved, relocating to Forst an der Weinstraße. Georg used the old village school as studio and started painting pictures featuring bird motifs. He exhibited several times in the next few years around Germany. He also participated in the 1972 documenta 5 in Kassel. This same year he began using a fingerpainting technique. He then began painting landscapes until 1975, chiefly based on motifs from around Deutschbaselitz. In 1975, the family moved to Derneburg, near Hildesheim. Baselitz visited New York for the first time and worked their for two weeks. He also visited Brazil, participating in the 13th Biennale in São Paulo.

In 1976, Baselitz set up an additional studio in Florence, which he used until 1981. In 1977, he began working on large-format linocuts. He began teaching at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Karlsruhe, where he is appointed professor in 1978. From 1978 until 1980, he worked on diptychs using the tempera painting technique (combinations of motifs), multipart pictures (series of motifs), and large-format individual works such as The Corn Gleaner/ Die Ährenleserin, Woman Clearing Away Rubble/ Trümmerfrau, Eagle/ Adler, and Boy Reading/ Der lesende Knabe. The works become more abstract, with scriptural elements predominating. In 1980, he showed his first sculpture at the Venice Biennale.

In 1981, Baselitz set up an addition study in Castiglione Florentino, near Arezzo, which he uses until 1987. His work is exhibited in New York for the first time in 1981. By 1982, he began devoting more time to sculpture, in addition to several exhibitions. In 1983, he began using Christian motifs in much of his artwork, and completed the major composition Dinner in Dresden/ Nachtessen in Dresden. In the same year, he took up a new professorship at the Hochschule der Künste Berlin. In 1986, in recognition of Baselitz's achievements, he was awarded the Kaiserring by the city of Goslar. Through the 1980s, Baselitz's work is exhibited frequently in Germany. In 1989, the title Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres was conferred upon Baselitz by French Minister of Arts Jack Lang.

In 1990, at the Nationalgalerie im Alten Museum in Berlin, the first major exhibition of Baselitz's works in East Germany was staged. In 1992, he resigned from the Akademie der Künste in Berlin. In 1993, he designed the set for Harrison Birtwistle's opera Punch and Judy, staged under the direction of Pierre Audi at the Dutch Opera in Amsterdam. He also took part in the International Pavilion at the Venice Biennale with the Male Torso/ Männlicher Torso sculpture, accompanied by oversized drawings. In 1994, Baselitz designed a stamp for the French postal service. He also produced his first ground gold picture that year. In 1995, the first major retrospective of Baselitz's work in the US is staged at the Guggenheim in New York City. This retrospective is also exhibited in Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles. Throughout the 1990s, his work was exhibited frequently throughout Europe.

Baselitz currently lives and works in Imperia. He recently sold his castle in Derneburg.