Gut Grau, 2009

Georg Baselitz belongs to the generation of German artists born during the period of the Second World War for whom the pictorial matrix, combined with the equally traditional matrix of sculpture, offers a basic point of departure for questioning what it signifies to be a German artist in the second half of the twentieth century.
Raised in East Germany, in Dresden, Baselitz was deemed by Academy officials to be immature as an artist and as a citizen. The artist responded with humor: he began studying artistic immaturity. He became passionate about children’s art, studied the Prinzhorn Collection of work by psychiatric patients and interwove the explosive instinctivity of those examples with the literary models of Artaud and Beckett. [...]