[Gallery Stroll] Sixty Years Painting Upside Down, In the End He Turned Himself Over

The Late German Master Georg Baselitz
A Solo Exhibition Returns to Sehwa Museum of Art After 19 Years
From the Cows of War and Falling Eagles to Wife Elke and Golden Final Works:
Tracing 60 Years Through 46 Pieces

In front of the Heungkuk Life Insurance Building in Gwanghwamun, Seoul, stands a 3.4-meter-tall black human figure. Its head is small, and the torso and limbs are rough, resembling chunks of wood hewn with an axe. This is ‘1965’, a sculpture created by Georg Baselitz (1938–2026) just two years before he passed away. The artist in his eighties summoned his 27-year-old self. The ‘Georg Baselitz’ exhibition, opening on August 13 at the Sehwa Museum of Art, is a journey back in time.

Exhibition view of "Georg Baselitz" currently held at Seoul Sehwa Museum of Art. The exhibition presents over 60 years of Baselitz's artistic journey through 46 works including paintings, drawings, and sculptures, ranging from his early works in the 1960s to pieces from the final period of his life. Sehwa Museum of Art

Upon entering the exhibition hall, time rewinds to 1966. In “Two Divided Cows I,” the cow's head and body appear separated and misaligned, as if cut apart. While the subject matter—a green meadow and cows—may seem bucolic, there is no sense of comfort. Having lived through World War II and the division of Germany, the young artist doubted how German society of the time romantically sought to restore images of homeland and nation. So he began, quite literally, by cutting his paintings. By fragmenting the subject and breaking up the visual order, he pioneered what he called “slice painting.”

Then in 1969, he took things further by turning his paintings upside down. From that moment onward, people, trees, eagles—everything in his compositions—faced downward. This marked the start of “inversion painting,” an approach that would become synonymous with Baselitz.

Why did he paint upside down? When a person is depicted upright, viewers are first prompted to ask “who is this?” When hung upside down, there is a pause before the story reveals itself. During that pause, one is drawn to the colors, the brushstrokes, the mounds of paint, and the structure of the composition. Baselitz chose neither the socialist realism of East Germany nor the abstraction dominant in West Germany’s art world. Instead, he carved out a third path. It was less a declaration to see the world upside down, and more a proposal to overturn our habitual ways of viewing art.

That act of inversion extended to political symbols as well. In “Later, Shoes Were Found” (2023), the German national symbol—the eagle—plunges headfirst in a blue field. The bird of heroes and power, once master of the sky, is brought crashing down to earth. The postwar German context, which shaped Baselitz, lingered in his paintings even into his eighties.

Georg Baselitz, "Two Split Cows I," 1966, oil on canvas, 160×130 cm. This is a representative work of early "fragmented painting," where the form of the cows is segmented and the composition of the canvas is deliberately misaligned. Private collection. Georg Baselitz 2026. Photo by Jochen Littkemann

But from the middle of the exhibition onward, the tone of the paintings shifts. A woman appears again and again. She is Elke Kretzschmar, Baselitz’s wife, whom he married in 1962 and spent more than 60 years with. “Elke II in France” (2019) is an enormous portrait, three meters tall. Yet her face is difficult to discern; instead, pink and gray paint scatters across a black canvas, and the figure is only just held together. It is as if, after a lifetime of gazing at a beloved, what remains is not a face but the vanishing traces of a body. If the young Baselitz overturned Germany’s history and its heroes, the aged painter confronted the aging of the person closest to him.

He made no exceptions with his own past, either. In the “Remix” series he began in the 2000s, Baselitz revisited the heroes, forests, and shoes he had painted in the 1960s, calling them back to life decades later. For most, a retrospective is a moment to organize finished works, but for Baselitz, revisiting the past meant taking up the brush again and painting over his own history. Once a rulebreaker in the art world, he refused even in old age to allow his own works to remain as fixed originals.

Unexpectedly, the end of the exhibition shimmers in gold. In the dark exhibition space hangs one of Baselitz’s final works: a “Gold Painting.” In “More Than That,” created this year, a few linear silhouettes of himself and Elke float on a gilded canvas. The gold gleams, but the figures are instead faint. Rather than glorifying the weary body, the work seems more concerned with holding onto the soon-to-disappear presence, however briefly, against a backdrop of gold.

Georg Baselitz, "Elke II in France," 2019, oil on canvas, 300×212 cm. This work depicts Elke, his lifelong companion, in a semi-abstract and inverted form, capturing the passage of time and the sensations of aging and decay. Private collection. Georg Baselitz 2026. Photo by Jochen Littkemann

The very process of creation changed for him in his later years. He worked with enormous canvases placed on the studio floor, relying on a wheelchair and walking aids. The surfaces bear traces not only of paint but of wheels and implements as well. The forms he had cut apart so boldly in his youth came, in old age, to echo the physical limitations of the aged artist himself.

In early April, the curatorial team from Sehwa Museum of Art met Baselitz in Germany. Seated in a wheelchair at the age of 88, the artist spoke about the six decades of his practice and the wars and national divisions shared by Korea and Germany. About three weeks later, on April 30, he passed away. What had been prepared as a solo exhibition for a living master became the first museum retrospective since his death.

In his final interview, Baselitz said, “Black is the beginning of aesthetic intention, and gold is the end of that journey.”

Sixty years fill the space in between: he cut apart cows, turned people upside down, and made the eagle plummet to earth. In his later years, he inverted even his own earlier art, and ultimately brought the aged bodies of himself and his wife onto the canvas. For Baselitz, to see things upside down was never a mere technical trick for making things look strange. It was a method for seeing again what had become so familiar as to be invisible.

This exhibition features 46 works—paintings, drawings, and sculptures—from his early pieces in the 1960s to his final works in 2026, with 39 being shown in Korea for the first time. It is the first Baselitz solo show at a Korean art museum in 19 years, since 2007. The exhibition runs through December 27.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.