Galerie Michael Werner, Cologne / Private Collection, Germany (acquired from Galerie Fred Jahn, Munich)

“The impetus for making my first woodcuts was loneliness. In 1966, I moved from Berlin to the countryside in Osthofen, in the Rhine-Hesse region. Before that, I had made etchings, but now I no longer had the technical means to print them. No one where I lived had a press, so I looked for another technique that I could carry out myself. I was also keen to make paintings and drawings, and graphics as well, within a kind of uninterrupted tradition. I wanted it that way. I knew that such a tradition did not exist. Of course I knew that. I knew that no one was making woodcuts. I believe I was the only one. I knew of no one who was making woodcuts, I mean among the so-called avant-garde artists, those who were working with new images. […] I think it was obstinate and eccentric to make woodcuts in the way I did. You can see that in the works from 1966. At times, they are not unlike chiaroscuro woodcuts from the sixteenth or early seventeenth century.” (Georg Baselitz)