BASELITZ AVANTI! on view at Museo del Novecento in Florence
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Museo del Novecento presents BASELITZ. AVANTI!, a major exhibition dedicated to Georg Baselitz, one of the leading figures of contemporary art, organised in collaboration with the artist’s studio. From 25 March to 13 September 2026, the museum will host for the first time in Italy a large-scale project focusing on a fundamental yet lesser-explored dimension of his practice: printmaking.
The exhibition marks a particularly significant return by the artist to Florence, a city with which he has maintained an intense and personal relationship for decades. Curated by Sergio Risaliti in collaboration with Daniel Blau, it brings together more than one hundred and seventy works, including works on paper, paintings, and sculptures, shaping a rich and articulated journey through over sixty years of activity and offering an in-depth reading of his research. The project thus stands as a tribute to one of the most important living artists, while at the same time focusing on a central and often overlooked core of his work: his printmaking practice.
In Georg Baselitz’s work, printmaking is by no means a secondary field in relation to painting or sculpture, but rather an autonomous ground of experimentation in which the artist has continually tested, developed, and at times redefined his images and themes. Since the 1960s, etching, woodcut, and linocut have constituted for him a space of both freedom and technical rigour, a place where the image can be dismantled, examined, and reconstructed through processes that are at once slow and complex, yet also “aggressive” and “unprecedented.” His first printmaking experiments date back to 1964, when Baselitz worked in the print workshop at Wolfsburg Castle in Lower Saxony, an experience that marked the beginning of an interest destined to become a permanent component of his practice. Florence played a decisive role in this journey: during his stay in the city in the 1960s, the artist came into direct contact with the Renaissance and Mannerist printmaking tradition, discovering the engravings of masters such as Parmigianino and exploring intaglio techniques that had already been developed during the Renaissance. From that moment on, Baselitz never ceased returning to the print studio, using printmaking as a privileged tool through which to reflect on his own imagery and creative processes.
Born in 1938 in Deutschbaselitz, Saxony, Baselitz grew up in a Germany devastated by war and marked by the deep political and moral fractures of the post-war period. This historical context exerted a lasting influence on his artistic vision, helping to shape a restless and critical gaze towards history, identity, and the images of tradition. From the outset, the artist rejected affiliation with movements, groups, or schools, choosing instead an autonomous position in relation to the dominant tendencies of contemporary art. At a time when abstraction seemed to have definitively supplanted figuration, Baselitz undertook a personal reconstruction of the image from its ruins, developing a powerful and deliberately destabilising figurative language. His works place the human body at the centre, often represented in fragmented, deformed, or narratively isolated forms.
One of the artist’s most celebrated and radical gestures is the inversion of figures, which from 1969 onwards became a structural principle of his work. By presenting images upside down, Baselitz removes the subject from immediate legibility and descriptive function, compelling the viewer to engage with the work in a different and more self-aware way. This reversal is not merely a provocative device, but a conceptual strategy through which he challenges the perceptual and cultural conventions of representation. Deprived of its habitual orientation, the image is transformed into a field in which the painterly gesture, the relationship between colour and surface, the compositional structure, and the tension between figure and space emerge with greater clarity.
For the first time, Museo Novecento is devoting almost all the spaces of the former Leopoldine complex to a single major monographic exhibition dedicated to Georg Baselitz. The exhibition unfolds across the museum’s three floors, spanning different phases of the artist’s production and offering a broad view of his research, as well as of the plurality of techniques that characterise it.
From the entrance onwards, visitors are introduced to Baselitz’s figurative world through a series of large linocuts produced between the late 1970s and the 2000s, in which some of the most recurrent motifs of his iconography appear, including the isolated human body or paired figures, fragmented forms, and subjects linked to the dimension of eros. Particularly striking is the use of black in the incised marks that define the figures.
In the chapel of the former Leopoldine, a group of works brings printmaking and sculpture into dialogue, including Pace Piece (2004), a sculpture originally created for the exhibition Forme per il David. 2004 Baselitz, Fabro, Kounellis, Morris, Struth, dedicated to Michelangelo Buonarroti’s David at the Galleria dell’Accademia, alongside a series of sugar-lift aquatints depicting feet and hands, images that in this context may evoke icons and relics of saints as found in places of worship.
From the 1980s onwards, Georg Baselitz consistently paired sculpture with painting and printmaking, opening up a further field of experimentation within his practice. His first public appearance as a sculptor took place in 1980 at the Venice Biennale, where he presented a large partially painted wooden body emerging from an unworked block. The work, Modell für eine Skulptur (Model for a Sculpture, 1979–80), immediately sparked heated debate in the media because of its iconographic ambiguity and the historical and political implications many perceived in it, revealing the artist’s ability to confront complex themes through deliberately unstable and contradictory images. In sculpture, Baselitz found a particularly direct medium, less mediated by the “artifice” of painting and therefore closer to the physical and concrete dimension of matter. Wood, the preferred material of these works, is shaped with tools such as chainsaws, axes, and chisels, which carve into the surface and leave visible traces of the working process.
Each blow thus becomes a mark that transforms mass into image and makes visible the tension between form and matter. Beginning in the early 2000s, Baselitz started casting his wooden sculptures in bronze, in order to preserve faithfully both the grain and the traces of workmanship, transferring into metal the memory of the original material. The initial polychromy gives way to a uniform black patina that enhances the compactness and plastic force of the figures, as exemplified by 1965 (2024), the large bronze sculpture occupying the centre of the museum’s cloister. Together with this work and the monumental Pace Piece (2004), on loan from the Galleria dell’Accademia, the exhibition also includes other significant works such as Dresdner Frauen – Elke (Dresden Women – Elke, 1989/2003), Römischer Gruß (Roman Salute, 2004/2025), and Gelbes Bein (Yellow Leg, 1993/2021).
The rooms on the museum’s first floor host a selection of woodcuts and linocuts in various formats, alongside a number of paintings that reveal the relationships between the different languages employed by the artist. In this context, some of the best-known themes of his production emerge, including works connected to the Heroes cycle, created in Berlin between 1965 and 1966, in which monumental and isolated figures rise from devastated landscapes as symbols of a wounded and morally unstable world. These characters, often depicted in torn uniforms or awkward and vulnerable poses, embody the condition of defeat and disorientation that marked post-war Europe. Alongside these works appear other recurring motifs from Georg Baselitz’s imagery, such as isolated heads and profiles, the celebrated Orangenesser (Orange Eaters) of the early 1980s, and the inverted figures that would become one of the defining features of his production.
An entire room is devoted to the so-called Remix series, initiated in 2005, in which Baselitz returned to some of his own historical works, reinterpreting them in a style that is often freer, more concise, and more immediate. This process of revision and reworking testifies to the complex relationship the artist maintains with his own visual history, conceived not as a static archive but as a repertoire of images continually open to new transformations.
The large gallery on the museum’s second floor finally presents a selection of works related to Baselitz’s most recent graphic production, including several pieces made in 2025 and shown here for the first time. Among them are new aquatints, resembling delicate ink drawings printed on a gold background, which testify to the artist’s ongoing technical experimentation and his ability to renew traditional languages. These rooms also feature several cycles of works developed in recent years, including those connected to the Avignon series of 2014, presented in 2015 at the Venice Biennale, in which nude and ageing figures appear suspended in space like fragile, almost skeletal presences. The title of the cycle refers to Pablo Picasso’s last major exhibition at the Palais des Papes in Avignon in 1970, an event received coolly by critics at the time, yet destined to stand as a powerful testament to the creative vitality of the artist in old age.
Other recurring motifs present in the exhibited works include the fragment of legs drawn from the cycle Spaziergang ohne Stock (2004), which in more recent works takes on an autobiographical dimension and becomes a kind of symbolic self-portrait, as well as the image of the eagle—heraldic animal of the German tradition—depicted by Baselitz not as triumphant but in a state of سقوط, while at the same time retaining its natural strength. This choice reflects the artist’s critical stance towards German history and national identity, often addressed through deliberately ambiguous and destabilising images. In some series, more intimate autobiographical elements also emerge, such as the numerous portraits of his wife Elke, a central figure in both the artist’s life and work, explored over the years through profiles, nudes, and figures that trace the passage of time.
Through more than one hundred and seventy works distributed across the museum’s three floors, BASELITZ. AVANTI! offers the most comprehensive overview of Georg Baselitz’s research and his extraordinary ability to continuously reinvent the language of figuration. The exhibition does not merely retrace the main stages of his career, but highlights the deeply experimental nature of his work, showing how painting, printmaking, and sculpture constitute three closely intertwined dimensions of a single investigation into the nature of the image and its limits. In this sense, the Museo Novecento exhibition presents the public with a complex and multifaceted vision of one of the most influential artists of our time, whose work continues to question, in a radical way, the relationship between art, history, and memory.
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