Elke

Mediums: oil, canvas.
Location: The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (the USA).

The artist painted portraits of his wife, Elke Kretzschmar Baselitz, for over thirty years of their life together, and she is the most common model of his works. Mostly these are full-length nude portraits, as in this work, turned upside down as usual. The artist’s wife says that he paints her simply because she is always near him, and it does not matter to him what to paint, a flower, a bird or a person. Nevertheless, Georg Baselitz himself claims the opposite. In one of his interviews, he said that the mood, colour and format of the portrait largely depend on the nature of the relationship between the model and the artist.