Georg Baselitz, the German artist whose upside-down paintings and provocative imagery have defined postwar European art for six decades, presents what may be among his most intimate works yet in a new exhibition opening at Venice’s Fondazione Giorgio Cini.
The exhibition “Eroi d’Oro” (Heroes of Gold) runs from May 6 to September 27, curated by Luca Massimo Barbero and organized in partnership with Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac. The show brings together recent large-format paintings that contrast the fragility of nude bodies with the luminous quality of gilded backgrounds.
For this Venice presentation, the 86-year-old Baselitz has painted inverted, dark portraits of himself and his wife Elke—a longtime favorite subject—on monumental-scale, gold-primed canvases. In these works, the artist and his wife appear nude, their forms rendered as delicate figures against the rich metallic backgrounds.
Born Hans-Georg Kern in 1938 in the Saxon village of Deutschbaselitz, he grew up amid the ruins of the Third Reich. That formative experience of destruction would profoundly influence his artistic vision. As he has said in interviews: “I was born into a destroyed order, a destroyed landscape, a destroyed people, a destroyed society.” He adopted the name Baselitz as a tribute to his Saxon birthplace.
The artist’s relationship with controversy began early in his career. His first solo exhibition in 1963 in Berlin was partially shut down when authorities seized two paintings on grounds of obscenity. The incident served as an early marker of Baselitz’s unflinching approach to art-making and his willingness to challenge social conventions through his work.
A decisive formal breakthrough came in 1969 with his first inverted painting. By turning his subjects upside down, Baselitz severed the conventional relationship between image and representation. The upended canvas became the signature approach of his entire career, demonstrating that figuration could sustain itself on purely painterly terms without relying on narrative or literal representation.
“The inversion was a method to avoid the story, to avoid the anecdote, to avoid false feelings,” Baselitz explained in a 2018 interview with Gagosian Quarterly. This technique forced viewers to focus on the painting as painting rather than as illustration or storytelling.
The Venice paintings employ a technique relatively new to his practice. These works represent some of the first instances where Baselitz has used gold ground, a method historically associated with early Renaissance masters like Duccio di Buoninsegna and Giotto. The gold creates an otherworldly luminosity that transforms the dark figural elements into something approaching the sacred or transcendent.
Baselitz’s career gained significant international recognition through major institutional presentations. He represented West Germany alongside Anselm Kiefer at the 1980 Venice Biennale, a pairing that helped establish both artists as leading voices of German Neo-Expressionism on the global stage. His first major American retrospective came at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1995.
More recent institutional recognition includes his election to the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 2019, making him one of the few living German artists to receive this honor. The Centre Pompidou in Paris mounted a major retrospective of his work in 2021-2022, cementing his status as one of Europe’s most significant contemporary artists.
The artist’s market value has reflected his critical standing and influence. His works regularly achieve significant prices at auction, with major pieces selling for millions of dollars. Museums worldwide, from the Museum of Modern Art in New York to the Tate Modern in London, hold important examples of his work in their permanent collections.
Throughout his career, Baselitz has worked across multiple media, including painting, sculpture, printmaking, and drawing. His wooden sculptures, often carved with chainsaws and axes, demonstrate the same raw energy and emotional directness that characterizes his paintings. These three-dimensional works frequently feature the same inverted orientation as his canvases.
The Venice exhibition comes at a moment when Baselitz continues to push his practice in new directions. Despite being in his mid-eighties, he remains remarkably productive, working from his studios in Germany and Austria. The gold-ground paintings represent his ongoing engagement with art historical traditions, even as he continues to subvert and reimagine them through his distinctive approach.
The Fondazione Giorgio Cini, housed on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore, provides an appropriate setting for these contemplative works. The institution, known for its commitment to preserving and presenting European cultural heritage, offers visitors the opportunity to experience Baselitz’s latest evolution within a context that honors both innovation and tradition.
“Eroi d’Oro” demonstrates that even after six decades of art-making, Baselitz continues to find new ways to challenge both himself and his audience, proving that the spirit of artistic inquiry that launched his career in the tumultuous 1960s remains as vital as ever.