Georg Baselitz

As a young painter coming into art in the early 1960s, Georg Baselitz (born 1938) was swift to reject the gestural abstraction that had dominated European and American painting since the end of World War Two, embracing instead a bold figurative expressionism. Often confounding optical habits by inverting his motifs, or pushing them close to abstraction, Baselitz forged new tensions and resistances in painting, and even today, he remains driven by fundamental questions on the potentials and limits of his art. Bildweg is published on the occasion of the artist's seventieth birthday, and ranges across his work, from the "Schwarz-weiss Negativ (Black and White Negative)"--one of the first "headstand" pictures--to his recent "remix" of his well-known large-format work "The Bridge Ghost's Supper."