His outstanding artistic work, which has repeatedly found new creative ways to challenge and perpetuate art historical traditions since the 1960s, has made Georg Baselitz one of the most famous figures in contemporary German art. With his influential figurative works, he defies established categories and repeatedly challenges our traditional perception of art. In 1963, Baselitz rose to fame overnight with a significant controversy. His paintings “Die große Nacht im Eimer” (The Great Night in the Bucket, 1962) and “Der nackte Mann” (The Naked Man, 1962), shown in a solo exhibition at the Werner & Katz Gallery in Berlin, caused a major scandal. The latter depicts an emaciated male nude lying dead in a grave-like hole with an oversized penis. A shocking painting that alludes both to depictions of Christ's corpse and to images from Nazi concentration camps, which were ignored by large parts of German society after the war. Both paintings were confiscated by the public prosecutor's office on charges of pornography. The following day, the BZ newspaper wrote: “This is a scandal the likes of which Berlin has not seen since the end of the war.” In his famous “Hero” paintings (1965/66), in which Baselitz stages physically and emotionally broken figures, the rebellious artist confronts post-war German society just as relentlessly with its painful past. In the late 1960s, these antiheroes were followed by the “Fraktur” paintings (1966–1968), which also contain an inherent destructive element, as they visually dismantle the subject. Our colorful paper work was created in the context of the painting “Zwei halbe Kühe” (Two Half Cows, 1968), which Ketterer Kunst sold with great success from the same southern German private collection in 2017. With energetic strokes, Baselitz captured the two animals' shapes, which are partly broken down into contrasting areas of color. Shortly after this critical early creative phase, Baselitz produced his first upside-down painting, “Der Wald auf dem Kopf” (The Forest on the Head, Museum Ludwig, Cologne), in 1969. Once again, Baselitz radically challenged our traditional viewing habits. This step, which would become Baselitz's artistic trademark, was another powerful act of painterly liberation. “The act of painting itself emancipates itself from representation, from the pictorial, and at the same time allows the works to appear representational and non-representational.” (Toni Stoss, in: Georg Baselitz, Gemälde und Skulpturen 1960-2008, p. 8). [JS]