Georg BaselitzThaddaeus Ropac Seoul, Fort Hill
Georg Baselitz: Per Mano
게오르그 바젤리츠: 손끝에서
About the exhibition
Look for the skulls. In the Schatten paintings of 2020, upside-down skulls surface with varying clarity inside a central mass of fast strokes, while a curved black shadow runs down the left side of each canvas. Baselitz took that shadow from a Titian portrait and turned it over.
The second series, Darkness Goldness (2019), sets huge golden hands against near-black grounds. Thaddaeus Ropac reads them as a frailer view of the artist's aging hand, far from the severed feet and swollen limbs of the 1960s.
Both are monotype paintings, in which each impression comes out differently. The gallery says neither series has been seen in Korea before and that the show was planned with Baselitz before the artist's death in April 2026. Mortality links the two groups, a concern the gallery traces to the Avignon cycle shown at the 2015 Venice Biennale.
About the artist
Georg Baselitz (1938–2026) was born in Saxony and from 1969 painted compositions upside down. At the 1980 Venice Biennale, Baselitz represented Germany alongside Anselm Kiefer. Later surveys include the Guggenheim in New York (1995) and the Centre Pompidou in Paris (2021).
Sources: Thaddaeus Ropac: Georg Baselitz · Thaddaeus Ropac Seoul: Per Mano
