Georg Baselitz, one of Germany’s most celebrated contemporary artists, has opened a major new exhibition in Venice that showcases his latest exploration of gold-ground painting techniques. “Eroi d’Oro” (Heroes of Gold) opened at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore, running concurrent with the 2024 Venice Biennale.
The exhibition features large-scale canvases covered entirely in gold leaf, over which Baselitz has painted delicate, linear drawings in black. The intimate works depict reclining nude figures—both the artist and his wife—viewed from above in a radical departure from his signature inverted compositions.
“These paintings represent a new chapter in Baselitz’s ongoing dialogue with art history,” said curator Luca Massimo Barbero during the exhibition’s opening. “The gold ground technique connects directly to Byzantine and early Renaissance masters like Duccio and Simone Martini.”
At 86, Baselitz continues to push his artistic practice in new directions. The gold-ground technique marks his first extended exploration of this historical method, traditionally used by medieval and Renaissance painters to create luminous, spiritual backgrounds for religious imagery.
Born Hans-Georg Kern on Jan. 23, 1938, in the Saxon village of Deutschbaselitz, the artist grew up amid the devastation of World War II and its aftermath. He later adopted the name Baselitz as a tribute to his birthplace, which shaped his artistic worldview profoundly.
“I was born into a destroyed order, a destroyed landscape, a destroyed people, a destroyed society,” Baselitz has said in interviews, describing how this formative experience of destruction became central to his artistic vision.
After being expelled from East Berlin’s Academy of Fine and Applied Arts for “sociopolitical immaturity,” Baselitz fled to West Germany in 1957 during the height of Cold War tensions. He continued his studies at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in West Berlin, where he began developing his distinctive artistic voice.
Controversy marked Baselitz’s career from its earliest days. His first solo exhibition in 1963 was shut down by a public prosecutor who seized two paintings on grounds of obscenity, establishing a pattern of institutional resistance that would follow his work.
The breakthrough that would define Baselitz’s international reputation came in 1969 with his first inverted painting. By turning his subjects upside down, he severed the conventional relationship between image and representation, forcing viewers to engage with the purely painterly qualities of the work rather than its narrative content.
This radical formal innovation became Baselitz’s signature approach, proving that figurative painting could sustain itself on purely visual terms without relying on storytelling or conventional representation. The upside-down motif became an emblem of his entire career and influenced countless contemporary artists.
Baselitz’s international profile soared when he represented Germany at the 1980 Venice Biennale alongside Anselm Kiefer. However, controversy followed him there as well. His sculptural work caused a sensation when viewers noticed that one figure’s raised arm resembled a Nazi salute, though Baselitz maintained the gesture referenced West African Lobi carvings symbolizing surrender.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Baselitz solidified his position as one of Germany’s most important postwar artists. His works entered major museum collections worldwide and began commanding significant prices at auction. Museums from the Museum of Modern Art in New York to the Tate Modern in London acquired his paintings, cementing his place in the contemporary art canon.
The artist’s market success has been substantial. His paintings regularly sell for millions of dollars at auction, reflecting sustained collector and institutional interest in his work across multiple decades.
The Venice exhibition demonstrates Baselitz’s continued willingness to experiment at an advanced age. The gold-ground paintings represent a significant departure from his typical practice, incorporating techniques that explicitly reference art historical traditions while maintaining his distinctive approach to figuration.
These latest works show Baselitz engaging directly with Renaissance painting methods while applying them to intensely personal subject matter. The intimate scale and private imagery mark a shift from his typically bold, public-facing compositions toward something more contemplative and introspective.
“Eroi d’Oro” offers visitors a unique opportunity to see how one of Germany’s most influential living artists continues to evolve his practice. The exhibition runs through Sept. 27, providing an extended look at this latest chapter in Baselitz’s six-decade career.
For art historians and contemporary art enthusiasts, the show represents an important moment to witness how a master painter approaches traditional techniques with fresh eyes, demonstrating that innovation in contemporary art can come through dialogue with historical precedent as much as through radical breaks with the past.