GEORG BASELITZ (German, born 1938) Akt Elke 2 (Nude Elke 2), 1976 Oil on canvas 78 3/4 x 63 3/4" (200 x 161.92 cm.) Collection Albright-Knox Art Gallery By exchange, Gift of Seymour H. Knox, Jr., 2001

Since 1969, the paintings of German artist Georg Baselitz have been immediately recognizable to anyone even vaguely familiar with his work because the subject matter is depicted upside-down. While, the "upside-down-ness" of Baselitz’s work is the most obvious and provocative feature of his paintings, it is, in the end, an artistic challenge that the artist sets for himself. By doing so, he deftly combines the worlds of abstraction and representation.

Born Hans-Georg Kern in 1938 in Deutschbaselitz, a small village near Dresden, he enrolled in the Academy of Visual and Applied Arts in East Berlin in 1956. After two semesters he was suspended for "social and political immaturity." Subsequently, he moved to West Berlin and changed his name to Georg Baselitz. There he studied the work of the surrealists, dadaists, and other European modernists, but it was his exposure to the work of the American abstract expressionists that was to have the most profound influence on the development of his work.

This painting is one of the many portraits he has made of his wife, Elke Kretzschmar, over the past thirty years. In these portraits, Baselitz challenges himself to deny and suppress his emotions about his model to focus instead on conveying pure visual structure in paint. It was this desire to use traditional and recognizable subject matter to explore painterly abstraction that led Baselitz to paint his subjects upside-down. As he explained it. "That is the best way to liberate representation from content."

- Jennifer Bayles, Educator for Special Projects