Georg Baselitz

About the exhibition

This show gathers 46 paintings, sculptures and drawings from more than 60 years of work by Georg Baselitz in Galleries 1, 2 and 3. Sehwa Museum of Art calls it a retrospective, meaning a look back across a whole career. The museum says it is the first exhibition of the artist in Korea since the artist's death in 2026.

The show begins with works from the 1960s to the 1980s built on recurring motifs. Late portraits of Elke, the artist's lifelong companion, come next, followed by Remix, a series from the 2000s onward in which Baselitz reworks earlier images. The show also looks at fragmented bodies and eagles, two subjects that run through the career. The final gallery holds the Gold Paintings, a series that absorbed the artist in the last years.

The museum lists regular docent tours through December and sign language tours.

About the artist

Georg Baselitz (1938–2026) was born Hans-Georg Bruno Kern in Saxony and took a new surname in 1961 from Deutschbaselitz, the village of the artist's birth. Baselitz worked in painting, drawing, sculpture and printmaking, including woodcuts and etchings, and from 1969 painted compositions upside down. At the 1980 Venice Biennale, Baselitz represented Germany alongside Anselm Kiefer and showed sculpture for the first time. Later surveys include the Guggenheim in New York (1995), the Royal Academy of Arts in London (2007) and the Centre Pompidou in Paris (2021). Baselitz died on April 30, 2026.

Sources: Thaddaeus Ropac: Georg Baselitz · Sehwa Museum of Art: exhibition page · The Art Newspaper: obituary