"It is only by starting from his origins that the artist can attempt to reconcile all the world's extremes."
Drawing on the Germanic tradition of ugly images, Baselitz builds his work around his personal history and that of Germany, revealing a permanent obsession to distinguish and reinvent himself, with the evolution of his painting and work marked by successive breaks. The artist expresses his belief in the absolute autonomy of the work and in the importance of the radical separation between subject and reality, which, in 1969, are at the heart of the reversal of the motif in his painting. Rather like the surrealists, to whom he feels close, Baselitz aims at each stage of his creation to invent new methods of representation, intending to jostle the viewer as much as to constrain himself. To this end, he chooses and paints subjects as conventional as landscapes, nudes, or portraits, but turns them upside down so that the subject does not distract from the painted image and the act of painting.