Georg Baselitz (b. 1938)

Hockender weiblicher Akt is a powerful example of Baselitz's celebrated inversion paintings. "In 1969 Baselitz took the decisive step, which was to govern all his subsequent work with the exception of the sculptures, and adopted the inverted subject technique as a consistent principle. By doing so he compelled the viewer to pay attention not only to the content--the theme clearly illustrated--but also, and primarily to painterly values. He was also committing himself to a much more difficult method of representation. He had to capture in his mind's eye an inverted image of reality. This demanded, not least, a stricter discipline, the violation in itself must be turned to account and made evident as a significant painterly event." (A. Franzke, Georg Baselitz, Munich, 1989, p. 111.)

Inversion represents a radical assault on the customary processes of seeing and representation. Baselitz argues, "The hierarchy which has located the sky at the top and the earth at the bottom is, in any case, only a convention. We have got used to it but we don't have to believe in it. The only thing that interests me is the question of how I can carry on painting these pictures." (Quoted in Georg Baselitz, Cologne, 1990, p. 96.) Baselitz focuses on the materiality of paint, the powerful, rough brushstrokes appear to carve the figure through jabs of paint, as opposed to earlier works where the central motif seems to both be composed of and able to control the flow of painted lines. The rough textured, carved aesthetic of the kneeling female figure and the patches of color in Hockender weiblicher Akt appear to anticipate Baselitz's work in sculpture, a medium he has explored since 1979.