The extraordinary oeuvre of the painter and sculptor Georg Baselitz (German, born in 1938) has helped shape postwar Western art. Rebellious from the conceptual and formal point of view, and perseverant in the execution of his ideas, Baselitz has provoked audiences time and again. His famous early series Hero Paintings (1965-1966) presented the alleged warriors as monumental but battered and distorted men. In 1969 Baselitz turned the painted figure upside down to allegedly liberate the depiction from the likeness to reality, and to question the categorizations of abstraction and figuration. Skeptical and ambiguous, Baselitz’s inversion has provoked the public ever since as it forces the viewer to look more closely at the painted matter, while casting doubts on making sense of the imaginable narrative.

The painting Einer ist im Dunklen (One is in the Dark, 2017) shows a naked cropped male figure in a characteristic upside-down position, hovering in the space. The color palette is reduced: black forms the background for the gray figure that is stepping down on the rudimentary stairs indicated by white lines. The seemingly simple composition contrasts with the dynamics of the paint. There is a lot going on in the patches of black and gray – there are spots, lines, and variations in hues, which all create a lush texture and force the viewer to look intensively. Baselitz’s inverted figures make the familiar look strange. In this permanent act of provocation, it is unclear whether Baselitz plays with his audiences, or whether this is a serious investigation into painterly processes and perception.