BASELITZ, Georg. Werkverzeichnis der Druckgrafik 1963-1982. Berlin: Gachnang & Springer. 1983.
Two vols, folio. Original brown cloth boards with lettering to spine and abstract illustration to cover with the original illustrated dust jackets, housed in card slipcase pp. I: [6], 7-229, [1]; II: [6], 7-265, [3]; a little rubbing to bottom and head of spine of dust jackets; otherwise near fine copy.
First edition, both volumes signed by the artist.
This two-volume set of large-format hardbacks, published by Gachnang & Springer in Berlin in 1983, constitutes the catalogue raisonné of Georg Baselitz’s graphic work from 1963 to 1982. Baselitz, one of the most influential Post-War artists, embraced the Abstract Expressionism condemned by the Nazis while placing the human figure at the centre of his practice. In the late 1960s he developed his celebrated strategy of inversion, portraying his subjects upside down - at once a means of slowing down his own process of composition, a deliberate act against conventional order, and a device to deepen the viewer’s apprehension of the essence of the work.
As Baselitz himself recalled: “I was born into a destroyed order, a destroyed landscape, a destroyed people, a destroyed society. And I didn’t want to re-establish an order: I had seen enough of so-called order. I was forced to question everything, to be ‘naive’, to start again”.
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