But wait

It's no secret that I occasionally change the orientation of my paintings as I work on them and sometimes even after I finish them. Some people who should know better, have mistakenly assumed that I do this because it "looks" better compositionally, as though I give a flying f about what the composition looks like. No gentle observer, I do this because I like double understandings and the mystery of discovering that which I have not discovered. Just now, in this inversion, I believe I have also discovered a title. I've also been a long-time admirer of Baselitz.

Inversion enabled Baselitz to bridge the gulf between the figurative tradition, stopped in its tracks by the Nazis and abstraction that came to dominate art by the 1950s. Baselitz describes his method:

The object expresses nothing at all. Painting is not a means to an end. On the contrary, painting is autonomous. And I said to myself: if this is the case, then I must take everything which has been an object of painting – landscape, the portrait, and the nude, for example – and paint it upside-down. That is the best way to liberate representation from content.

The hierarchy which has located the sky at the top and the earth at the bottom is, in any case, only a convention. We have got used to it, but we don’t have to believe in it. The only thing that interests me is the question of how I can carry on painting pictures.

[Michael Auping. Detlev Gretenkort (ed). Georg Baselitz: Paintings, 1962–2001. Milan: Alberico Cetti Serbelloni Editore, 2002: 16–18. 20]

Not saying this inversion will stay, but I've noticed in this last series, I have 3 paintings so far that I have inverted. And it's making my show title all the more apropos.