Overview
Thaddaeus Ropac Seoul presents Per Mano, an exhibition conceived in close collaboration with Georg Baselitz before his passing in April 2026. The show pays homage to the late artist’s prodigious oeuvre through two series of paintings, never before seen in Korea, that epitomise the final decade of his practice. It also marks the first time Baselitz’s Schatten works (2020) will be showcased since his retrospectives at the Sakıp Sabancı Museum, Istanbul (2024) and the Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao (2025). Inspired by Titian’s Archbishop Filippo Archinto (c. 1558, Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA), these vibrant works crystallise his unwaveringly raw treatment of paint, which coalesces to form elusive, disembodied heads overcast by the titular shadow. In the Darkness Goldness paintings (2019–25), meanwhile, the artist depicts monumental golden hands that flicker with a spectral quality, suspended amid pitch-dark grounds reminiscent of Lucas Cranach the Elder. Both series shed light on Baselitz’s sustained, eminently sensitive engagement with mortality since the seminal Avignon cycle of works he presented at the Venice Biennale in 2015.
Thaddaeus Ropac Seoul presents Per Mano, an exhibition conceived in close collaboration with Georg Baselitz before his passing in April 2026. The show pays homage to the late artist’s prodigious oeuvre through two series of paintings, never before seen in Korea, that epitomise the final decade of his practice. It also marks the first time Baselitz’s Schatten works (2020) will be showcased since his retrospectives at the Sakıp Sabancı Museum, Istanbul (2024) and the Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao (2025). Inspired by Titian’s Archbishop Filippo Archinto (c. 1558, Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA), these vibrant works crystallise his unwaveringly raw treatment of paint, which coalesces to form elusive, disembodied heads overcast by the titular shadow. In the Darkness Goldness paintings (2019–25), meanwhile, the artist depicts monumental golden hands that flicker with a spectral quality, suspended amid pitch-dark grounds reminiscent of Lucas Cranach the Elder. Both series shed light on Baselitz’s sustained, eminently sensitive engagement with mortality since the seminal Avignon cycle of works he presented at the Venice Biennale in 2015.
