35 Quotes by Georg Baselitz

You cannot deny your origins: I love Kirchner more than Matisse, although Matisse was a greater artist. That isn’t to do with nationality. It’s a stronger feeling.

I always feel attacked when I’m asked about my painting.

Women don’t paint very well. It’s a fact. There are, of course, exceptions. Agnes Martin or, from the past, Paula Modersohn-Becker.

Museums collect what’s important in their respective countries. In Berlin’s National Gallery, however, this isn’t the case. They’re interested neither in me nor the other usual suspects. It’s simply a German reality.

In Germany, we often hear the absurd complaint that museums don’t have the money to buy paintings. Of course, I’m not talking about me and my paintings. There are, after all, more popular painters in this country.

I had always loved expressionist painting, like every European. In fact I admired it all the more because these were precisely the paintings despised by my father’s generation.

I don’t like things that can be reproduced. Wood isn’t important in itself but rather in the fact that objects made in it are unique, simple, unpretentious.

I always work out of uncertainty but when a painting's finished it becomes a fixed idea, apparently a final statement. In time though, uncertainty returns... your thought process goes on.