died in April <\/a>aged 88 years old. He was one of the most influential, recognisable painters of his generation, and this body of work was his last. It\u2019s impossible to look at these paintings and drawings and not see them through the lens of death. They feel like a final attempt to come to terms with life and what it has meant, and a desperate, furious, chaotic reckoning with the end of it all.<\/p>\nHe painted these final works from a wheeled office chair with a paintbrush on a stick, the canvas splayed out on the floor in front of him, his body not strong enough to stand like it used to. But they are still immediately recognisable as Baselitz works, filled with scrawled nude bodies, hung upside down to disorientate the viewer and subvert your gaze. It\u2019s just that now the chair has left mucky tracks across the paintings, evidence of the slow creep of decrepitude.<\/p>\n
Georg Baselitz, Indische Ta\u0308nze in Pittsburgh (Indian Dances in Pittsburgh), 2025. Photograph: Georg Baselitz<\/p>\n
The figures in these works, as usual, are mainly him and Elke, his wife and great muse. It\u2019s their sagging skin and brittle limbs scrawled on every work.<\/p>\n
As soon as you walk in and see that body falling through the sky you know exactly what Baselitz was dealing with: life is a trip, a rush, and then bang, you hit the dirt and you\u2019re dead. But the two paintings on either side are far less accepting of that fate. Instead of still and calm, the figures are flailing and thrashing, they\u2019ve grown extra limbs, they are fighting against what\u2019s coming, they are panicked, manic.<\/p>\n
They look like spiders trying to climb out of a bathtub, and he repeats them over and over. The final gallery is filled with these enormous golden insectile forms wriggling on black canvases, falling into the abyss, trying desperately to escape. They\u2019re pretty horrifying things, bleak, angry, filled with fear.<\/p>\n
Things are calmer in the room of golden canvases. Here, his and Elke\u2019s bodies are papery thin, fragile things. You can barely distinguish one from the other, they\u2019ve almost become one figure now. For years, we\u2019ve been watching Baselitz\u2019s figures become frailer and weaker \u2013 he wasn\u2019t a prolific painter, and he had his fair share of exhibitions, so we got to see him age over time, his lines become shakier, his figures become saggier and more gaunt. But this is another level, a sense of finality, of impending morbidity, of bodies broken beyond repair. With the gold canvases, it\u2019s like he\u2019s canonising himself and his wife, turning the figures into Byzantine religious icons. He knew, I guess, that artists outlive themselves through their work, and these are objects to be worshipped long after he\u2019s gone.<\/p>\n
Georg Baselitz, Sigmund fliegt mit Sex im Koffer (Sigmund Flies with Sex in His Suitcase), 2024. Photograph: Georg Baselitz<\/p>\n
Eagles appear here, as they have throughout his career, as symbols of his youth in shattered, half-destroyed postwar Germany. They too are frantic, a big messy explosion of jostling wings, crashing to the ground. \u201cNow that I\u2019m more or less at the end of my painting activity, I thought I should draw some kind of conclusion,\u201d Baselitz said. The eagles, the bodies, the references to art history: this is him reaching for all of the touchstones of his life in art.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve never been a huge Baselitz fan: I found the whole upside down painting thing an affectation and I would have happily fronted a campaign to have all his work shown the right way up so we can see what it\u2019s really about. I also think he churned out the same painting for decades.<\/p>\n
But this is brutally emotional stuff. How could you not be moved by a painter this important, trying to say goodbye and doing it so beautifully? He wanted a conclusion, well here it is, a full stop on a career. Or an exclamation point. What a painfully sad goodbye.<\/p>\n
Georg Baselitz: Back Again is at White Cube Bermondsey, London from 10 June to 30 August<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On one wall, a body falls calmly through a serene blue sky. On the opposite, splat, it\u2019s landed…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":725399,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[76,354,355,49,48,356,75],"class_list":["post-725398","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-design","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/725398","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=725398"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/725398\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/725399"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=725398"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=725398"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=725398"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}