Georg Baselitz’s Final Venice Exhibition Turns Toward Closure, and Reinvention
In Venice this week, an exhibition Baselitz had already accepted would be his last has taken on the weight of a final statement. At the Fondazione Giorgio Cini on San Giorgio Maggiore, Thaddeaus Ropac has opened “Eroi d’Oro” (“Heroes of Gold”), a presentation of the final paintings Georg Baselitz completed before his death.
Baselitz described the works without hesitation as his “last paintings.” He said he meant them as a summation of a career that stretched across more than six decades, and the exhibition makes that intention visible in unusually direct terms. The paintings are large, almost architectural in scale, with gold grounds that catch the light and thin black figures drawn across them. In many of the works, the figures are Baselitz or his wife, Elke, lying horizontally, as if suspended between portraiture and disappearance.
The effect is spare rather than theatrical. Baselitz linked the gold surfaces to Fayum mummy portraits, Sienese altarpieces, and Byzantine icons, all traditions associated with the dead, the sacred, or the eternal. French art historian Eric Darragon, who knew the artist well, said the references borrow the visual authority of medieval painters such as Duccio, Simone Martini, Fra Angelico, and Stefan Lochner, but remove the religious function. What remains, he argued, is an “impassive, definitive surface” that “sanctifies nothing.”
That reading fits an artist whose career was built on resistance. Baselitz became known for work that unsettled expectations from the start: the scandal of his early figurative paintings in the 1960s, the upside-down canvases that became his signature, and the wooden figures shown at the 1980 Venice Biennale, which seemed to salute like damaged monuments. His art repeatedly rejected polish, taste, and the comfort of easy interpretation.
Yet “Eroi d’Oro” is not simply a retrospective gesture. Darragon said the exhibition feels paradoxical because it behaves like an ending while still carrying the energy of a beginning. Baselitz, he noted, was defined by a constant need to start afresh and move into uncertainty, even after 60 years of intense work.
That tension may be the most durable part of his legacy. Baselitz’s final paintings do not resolve his career so much as distill it: the refusal of convention, the insistence on reinvention, and the uneasy space between image, memory, and disappearance.
