Georg Baselitz

Skira's new series Milestones: At the Heart of Creation, dedicated to today's greatest artists, proudly presents this volume.

The Milestones series is a collection of books devoted to today's greatest artists. More than retrospectives, Milestones are comprehensive excursions into the daily life and work of exceptional contemporary artists and provide a rare backstage glimpse at their art.

Each volume of the series presents one or more intimate interviews with the artist by a curator or a fellow artist, an essay by a renowned author, and the artist's biography. The iconography of the book includes images and plates of the key works explained by the artists themselves and an original photoshoot of the artist in his studio by leading photographers (such as Jabulani Dhlamini, David Michalek), as well as a "family album" with previously unpublished shots and personal photos.

German painter, printmaker, and sculptor Georg Baselitz (1938-2026) was a pioneering postwar artist who rejected abstraction in favour of recognisable subject matter, deliberately employing a raw style of rendering and a heightened palette in order to convey direct emotion. Embracing the German Expressionism that had been denounced by the Nazis, Baselitz returned the human figure to a central position in painting.