Georg Baselitz’s Venice exhibition turns a lifetime of inversion into a final, unsettling meditation
On San Giorgio Maggiore, the German artist’s last major presentation arrives with an unusual charge: Georg Baselitz died a week before the opening of Eroi d’Oro (Golden Heroes), a show that now reads as both retrospective statement and memorial. Installed in two large rooms and on view until September 27, the exhibition gathers very large upright canvases showing a single inverted nude drawn in a fine black line against gold grounds. Most of the figures are based on Elke Kretzschmar, Baselitz’s wife and a constant presence in his work. One smaller painting depicts the artist himself, also upside down, aged and stripped to essentials.
Baselitz recorded two brief statements for the exhibition, and in them he described the paintings as a summation of his life and work. The phrase feels apt, but incomplete. These works are not only about autobiography. They are also about age, vulnerability, and the stubborn dignity of the body as it changes. Baselitz’s upside-down figures have long unsettled viewers by refusing easy orientation; here, that device becomes more than a formal signature. It suggests a world in which order has slipped, and in which history itself has been turned over.
That sense of instability resonates beyond the gallery. The Venice Biennale has unfolded amid political tension, demonstrations, and a broader unease about the place of art in public life. Baselitz’s exhibition, set slightly apart from the noise, feels almost protected by distance. Elsewhere, art appears more exposed.
The article draws a direct line from Venice to the United Kingdom, where recent council elections and the rise of Reform UK have sharpened debates about identity, belonging, and cultural authority. Nigel Farage has said that a historic shift has taken place in the political landscape. Whether one agrees with that claim or not, the implications for museums are hard to ignore. Clare Palmier, director of The Art Station in Saxmundham, East Suffolk, argues that cultural organizations must look beyond political swings while also strengthening local institutions against future shocks. Tony Butler, executive director of Derby Museums Trust, has emphasized the need to create common ground where divergent views can meet.
There are already attempts to do that through citizens’ assemblies and juries, including initiatives at New Art Exchange in Nottingham and Birmingham Museums Trust. But the article also warns against complacency. It points to the 1930s, when authoritarian regimes began reshaping culture by controlling museum appointments. By the end of 1933, most left-leaning museum directors in Germany had been replaced by Nazi-friendly personnel with little art-world experience. The lesson is stark: political interference in museums is often an early warning sign, not a late-stage symptom.
A memorial exhibition of Baselitz’s mid-1960s hero paintings is scheduled later this year at Thaddaeus Ropac gallery, extending the conversation his Venice show has already reopened: what happens when art insists on looking at history, and history looks back?
