About
This idea of “looking toward the future” is nonsense. I realized that simply going backwards is better. You stand in the rear of the train—looking at the tracks flying back below—or you stand at the stern of a boat and look back—looking back at what’s gone.
—Georg Baselitz
German painter, printmaker, and sculptor Georg Baselitz is a pioneering postwar artist who rejected abstraction in favor of recognizable subject matter, deliberately employing a raw style of rendering and a heightened palette in order to convey direct emotion. Embracing the German Expressionism that had been denounced by the Nazis, Baselitz returned the human figure to a central position in painting.
Born Hans-Georg Kern in Deutschbaselitz, Saxony, Germany, Baselitz attended the Hochschule für Bildende und Angewandte Kunst in East Berlin, from which he was expelled in 1957 for “sociopolitical immaturity.” He then moved to West Berlin, where he attended the Hochschule der Künste and completed his postgraduate studies in 1962. It was during this time that he changed his surname to Baselitz. From his youth, Baselitz had been interested in the German Expressionists’ use of “primitive” sources such as folk art, children’s art, and art of the mentally ill. To assert his independence from popular art of the postwar years, Baselitz and fellow artist Eugen Schönebeck wrote the so-called “Pandemonic Manifestos” (1960–62), a violent and shocking expression of the frustration of working in postwar Germany. In 1963 Baselitz had his first solo exhibition, which was an immediate scandal: the painting Die große Nacht im Eimer (The Big Night Down the Drain) (1962–63), depicting a distorted figure holding an oversized phallus, was removed from the exhibition due to charges of obscenity and not returned to Baselitz until the conclusion of a lengthy trial. In 1965 Baselitz turned to the subject of “heroes.” Painted in thick impasto, the Helden (Heroes) (1965–66)—also known as the Neue Typen (New Types)—portray figures standing within natural landscapes. Disheveled and fragmented, these war-torn figures elicit an emotional response in the viewer as they evoke the events of recent history.
In 1969 Baselitz began to paint and display his subjects upside down in order to slow down his process of painting as well as the viewer’s comprehension of the motif. These iconic paintings, depicting inverted figures, landscapes, and still lifes, achieve a form of abstraction while maintaining figuration. Through the 1980s, his work took on an added density as he further employed a wide range of formal and art historical references, including the paintings of Edvard Munch and Emil Nolde. Concurrently, he began creating large-scale sculptures made of painted wood, presenting these works for the first time at the 1980 Biennale di Venezia, where he showed Modell für eine Skulptur (Model for a Sculpture) (1979–80).
The paintings that Baselitz produced between 1990 and 2010 marked another shift in his practice, displaying a more linear and abstract approach to the figure. In the Remix series (2005–08), Baselitz revisited his earlier works, graphically re-presenting his prior subjects such that their subtle meanings and technical innovations were made more explicit. In 2015 Baselitz’s Avignon (2014) paintings—a suite of eight towering nude self-portraits—were featured in the Biennale di Venezia. The following year related self-portraits with spectral figures were presented at Gagosian, West 21st Street, New York. In 2018 a large retrospective of Baselitz’s work was presented at the Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Switzerland, and at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC.
Exhibitions
Georg Baselitz: Archinto
On the occasion of Georg Baselitz: Archinto at Museo di Palazzo Grimani, Venice, Artcore Films produced a short documentary featuring the artist. In the video, Baselitz details the origins of the project, how he approached the unique space, and his experiments in process and technique.

Baselitz: La rétrospective
Richard Calvocoressi visits Georg Baselitz’s retrospective exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and reflects on both the historical specificity and timeless themes of the artist’s sixty-year career.

Georg Baselitz: Pulling Up the Image
In celebration of five recent projects related to Georg Baselitz, Richard Calvocoressi, Max Hollein, and Katy Siegel speak with the artist and look at his prolific career.

Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Fall 2021
The Fall 2021 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Damien Hirst’s Reclining Woman (2011) on its cover.
Georg Baselitz: What if...
Richard Calvocoressi narrates a tour of an exhibition of new paintings by Georg Baselitz in San Francisco, describing the visual effect of these luminous compositions and explaining their relationship to earlier works by the artist.

Artist to Artist: Georg Baselitz and Zeng Fanzhi
On the occasion of Georg Baselitz: Years later at Gagosian, Hong Kong, Zeng Fanzhi composed a written foreword for the exhibition’s catalogue and a video message to the German painter. Baselitz wrote a letter of thanks to the Chinese artist for his insightful thoughts.

Georg Baselitz: Life, Love, Death
Richard Calvocoressi writes on the painter’s latest bodies of work, detailing the techniques employed and their historical precedents.

Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Summer 2020
The Summer 2020 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Joan Jonas’s Mirror Piece 1 (1969) on its cover.
![Georg Baselitz, Ohne Titel (nach Pontormo) (Untitled [after Pontormo]), 1961.](https://gagosian.com/media/images/quarterly/essay-baselitz-bildung/qxhewJId3rEi_275x275.jpg)
Baselitz Bildung
On the occasion of a career-spanning exhibition at the Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice, Richard Calvocoressi tracks the evolution of Georg Baselitz’s development from his early education in East Germany to his revelatory trip to Florence, in 1965, and beyond.
Visions of the Self: Jenny Saville on Rembrandt
Jenny Saville reveals the process behind her new self-portrait, painted in response to Rembrandt’s masterpiece Self-Portrait with Two Circles.

Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Summer 2019
The Summer 2019 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring a detail from Afrylic by Ellen Gallagher on its cover.

Baselitz: Devotion
Georg Baselitz speaks with Sir Norman Rosenthal on the subject of his latest work. The two discuss these paintings, all depictions of self-portraits by artists from the past and present, and what it means to pay homage.
Fairs, Events & Announcements
Video
Georg Baselitz
Archinto
This video takes the viewer through Georg Baselitz: Archinto, an exhibition of new and recent paintings and sculptures by the artist at Museo di Palazzo Grimani, Venice, on view May 19, 2021–November 27, 2022. In this show, Baselitz pays homage to Venice and its rich artistic tradition, establishing art historical continuity while also signaling a rupture between the Renaissance portrait tradition and its contemporary equivalents.
Still from “Georg Baselitz: Archinto”

Art Fair
Art Basel Hong Kong 2022
May 27–29, 2022, booth 1C15
Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre
www.artbasel.com
Gagosian is pleased to participate in Art Basel Hong Kong 2022 with an ensemble of contemporary works by international artists. The gallery’s presentation will feature works by artists including Georg Baselitz, Louise Bonnet, Edmund de Waal, Urs Fischer, Katharina Grosse, Mark Grotjahn, Jennifer Guidi, Simon Hantaï, Hao Liang, Damien Hirst, Thomas Houseago, Tetsuya Ishida, Alex Israel, Ewa Juszkiewicz, Rick Lowe, Takashi Murakami, Albert Oehlen, Nam June Paik, Giuseppe Penone, Rudolf Polanszky, Sterling Ruby, Ed Ruscha, Jenny Saville, Jim Shaw, Rudolf Stingel, Spencer Sweeney, Rachel Whiteread, and Zeng Fanzhi.
Gagosian’s booth at Art Basel Hong Kong 2022. Artwork, left to right: © Georg Baselitz; © Louise Bonnet; © Zeng Fanzhi; © 2019 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All rights reserved; © Rudolf Stingel. Photo: Martin Wong

Art Fair
Zona Maco 2022
February 9–13, 2022, booth B115
Centro Citibanamex, Mexico City
www.zsonamaco.com
Gagosian is pleased to announce its return to Zona Maco México Arte Contemporáneo for the first time since 2018; significantly, this is also the gallery’s first in-person art fair of 2022. Gagosian is presenting a specially curated selection of dynamic paintings, sculptures, and works on paper by iconic figures long associated with the gallery, juxtaposed with works by key contemporary artists. Many of the featured artists are being represented at Zona Maco for the first time.
Rachel Whiteread, Untitled (November), 2020 (detail) © Rachel Whiteread. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd.
Museum Exhibitions

On View
Georg Baselitz
Archinto
Through November 27, 2022
Museo di Palazzo Grimani, Venice
polomusealeveneto.beniculturali.it
Archinto presents new and recent paintings and sculptures by Georg Baselitz. Installed on the piano nobile, the exhibition includes twelve paintings made expressly for the Sala del Portego, which hang on eighteenth-century stucco-framed panels where portraits of the Grimani family had been on display until the end of the nineteenth century. In this show, Baselitz pays homage to Venice and its rich artistic tradition, establishing art historical continuity while also signaling a rupture between the Renaissance portrait tradition and its contemporary equivalents. The exhibition is curated by Mario Codognato and organized by Venetian Heritage and Direzione regionale Musei Veneto, in association with Gagosian.
Georg Baselitz, Jorn, 2020 © Georg Baselitz. Photo: Jochen Littkemann

Closed
Donation d’œuvres de Georg Baselitz
May 19, 2021–May 8, 2022
Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris
www.mam.paris.fr
Donation d’œuvres de Georg Baselitz displays six landmark paintings gifted by the artist to the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris. Each donated work represents an essential stage within Baselitz’s forty-year career: the tree, which was the subject of his first upside-down image; a “remix” of his 1962–63 painting, Die große Nacht im Eimer (The Big Night Down the Drain); several heads, a favorite subject of the artist from the outset; and finally, a work from the series dedicated to Sigmund Freud.
Georg Baselitz, Tête, 1993, Musee d’Art Moderne de Paris © Georg Baselitz. Photo: Jochen Littkemann

Closed
Georg Baselitz
La rétrospective
October 20, 2021–March 7, 2022
Centre Pompidou, Paris
www.centrepompidou.fr
Wavering between figuration, abstraction, and a conceptual approach, Georg Baselitz’s powerful work is inextricably linked to the artist’s imagination and experience, illustrating the complexity of being a painter and an artist in postwar Germany. The exhibition brings together his work from the last six decades in chronological order, exploring his most striking creative periods, including the well-known Fracture paintings and the inverted figures of his iconic upside-down compositions.
Installation view, Georg Baselitz: La rétrospective, Centre Pompidou, Paris, October 20, 2021–March 7, 2022. Artwork © Georg Baselitz, 2021

Closed
Georg Baselitz
Vedova accendi la luce
May 20–October 31, 2021
Fondazione Emilio e Annabianca Vedova, Venice
www.fondazionevedova.org
This exhibition of work by Georg Baselitz, whose title translates to Vedova, turn the light on, includes a series of paintings divided into two sequences. The first part consists of ten canvases dedicated to the artist’s wife, Elke, depicting her as ice cream. The second part comprises seven paintings dedicated to Emilio Vedova, which are, for the most part, monochrome or bicolored; their titles afford the public a glimpse into the relationship between the artist and his longtime friend.
Installation view, Georg Baselitz: Vedova accendi la luce, Fondazione Emilio e Annabianca Vedova, Venice, May 20–October 31, 2021. Artwork © Georg Baselitz, 2021