Flaschen (1978) belongs to the major series of works centred on the bottle motif that Georg Baselitz produced that year. Across these five works on paper, the bottle is repeatedly reconfigured through loose passages of pencil, charcoal and watercolour, its form alternately emerging from and dissolving into dense black and blue gestures. Within the wider series, Baselitz also paired portraiture and still life more explicitly in the diptych Rote Elke / Die Flasche, juxtaposing an image of his wife, Elke, with that of a bottle and granting figure and object an equivalent pictorial presence. The series also anticipates Baselitz’s landmark Drinkers, begun in the early 1980s. Together with the related Orange Eaters, the Drinkers formed a central part of Baselitz’s first gallery exhibition in the United States, held at Xavier Fourcade Gallery in New York in 1981, a pivotal moment in the expansion of his international reputation.