Overview
- The death of the German painter and sculptor was announced by his gallery Thaddaeus Ropac at the request of his family.
- He became known for flipping subjects on their head, a shift he began with the 1969 painting Forest Upside Down.
- He said the inversion freed paintings from dependence on literal reality and created a new way to read the image.
- He clashed with East German art authorities early in his career and was expelled from the Weissensee art school for indiscipline.
- He kept working even from a wheelchair in later years, and he had a new Venice show set to open featuring recent large gold-ground works.