BERLIN — German artist Georg Baselitz died peacefully on Thursday in Berlin at age 88. The Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery, which represented him, confirmed his death.

Born Hans-Georg Kern on January 23, 1938, in Deutschbaselitz, a village in the eastern Saxony region, he was born in Nazi-ruled Germany before the outbreak of World War II and grew up in East Germany. He studied art in East Berlin and moved to West Berlin in 1957 at a time of rising political pressure. He adopted the name Baselitz in 1961 as a nod to his birth village.

Baselitz worked in painting, graphic arts, sculpture, drawing, and printmaking. In 1963, authorities confiscated two of his paintings on display at an art gallery for containing sexual symbolism, leading to a high-profile court battle. In 1969, he began painting his canvases upside down and inverting motifs, starting with "Der Wald auf dem Kopf" (The Forest on its Head), which featured trees upside down. German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, who served from 1998 to 2005, hung one of the upside-down eagle paintings behind his desk in the chancellery, ensuring it appeared in his official portraits.

A wooden sculpture he exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1980 was made of linden wood he attacked with an axe and chainsaw and depicted a seated figure performing what appeared to be a Nazi salute. At the sixth edition of documenta in Kassel in 1977, he removed his works in protest against the presence of painters from East Germany. German police recovered 15 stolen paintings and drawings by Baselitz worth around 2.5 million euros in 2017.

"All German painters have neuroses when it comes to Germany's past, be it war, especially the aftermath of war, or the GDR. All that weighed on me in the form of a strong bout of depression, and with strong force. If you want, my paintings are battles," Baselitz said. He also said: "I am an avant-gardist. What I do is quite aggressive and quite evil."

His remarks about women artists also drew attention. "Women don't paint very well," he said, adding: "The market doesn't lie. Even though the painting classes in art academies are more than 90% made up by women, it's a fact that very few of them succeed." He later withdrew some of those statements and expressed admiration for Tracey Emin and Artemisia Gentileschi.

"Georg Baselitz did not just turn his paintings upside down; he also turned our thinking routines upside down. Having experienced the destruction and suffering of the Second World War as a child, the collapse of all order forced him to question everything around him," German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier said.