Untitled

The imagery of a man’s head, hanging upside down with a bottle in his mouth, has its genesis in the late 1960s when Georg Baselitz—born in East Germany but an artist living in West Germany— began to depict what he called “new types” of lone male figures to confront aspects of recent German history, while capturing uncertainties and anxieties that permeated Cold War European culture more widely. 

It was in 1969 that Baselitz first turned his figures upside-down. This compositional move was intended to unsettle the viewer and stress the artifice of the painted surface as well as literally inverting the reality of the physical world. The gestural brush stroke of thick black ink lines the artist used in this work creates a stark figural contour, which mirrors the kinds of outlines used by Expressionist artists in Germany before World War I.