Painter Georg Baselitz 'The bigger the canvas, the more freely I can work'

"They’re really big!" Sitting in a wheelchair, 87-year-old Georg Baselitz seems to be rediscovering his own paintings. Almost 5 meters high, with black or lush green backgrounds, his canvases display pink bodies and glittering cosmos. The artist is back at Galerie Ropac, Pantin, as if to say that he intends to perpetuate his own history, the one that saw him create a scandal in 1963, at his first solo show in Berlin, with a portrait of a deformed man masturbating. Or, later, with Der Wald auf dem Kopf (The Forest on Your Head, 1969), in which he inaugurated what was to become a recurrent feature of his work: the inversion of the subject, now painted upside down. « Inverting the motif is a way of combining figuration, abs- traction and a conceptual approach », he explains. For us, it’s an admission of a stubborn desire for scandal, a resistance to the too-easy images of art. Today, we see this in his drawings, of scribbled women and men caught in the void, a stren- gth and a respite.

Is your new exhibition, 'Ein Bein von Manet aus Paris', a tribute to the painter Édouard Manet ?

Like all Germans, I’m very fond of Édouard Manet (1832-1883). His finest painting, in my opinion, is L'Exécution de Maximilien ('The Execution of Maximilien', 1868-1869), on display at the Mannheim Museum. But, looking at his paintings, I noticed that he attached little importance to anatomy, particularly the legs. In this painting, where soldiers point their rifles at the emperor, perspective and anomalies abound, as in his Jeune Femme couchée en costume espagnol (Young Reclining Woman in Spanish Costume), painted in 1862. It’s technically wrong, and I think it’s magnificent! I don’t know if it’s intentional with Manet, but I find that deliberately incorporating faults makes the paintings interesting.

All the works exhibited in Pantin were created in 2024 and 2025.
So you never stop creating?

I paint and draw all the time and everywhere, whether in my large studio in Impe- ria, Italy, in Salzburg, Austria, or in my home in Munich. What surrounds me, be it nature or the city, has no influence on my painting. I live in the studio, concentra- ting on my canvases, looking for any detail that might interest me.

How do you work?

One day, long before I had to use a wheelchair, I decided to work on the floor. The bigger the canvas, the more it reaches beyond me, the freer I can work, with no limits. I don’t need the overall view. With my nose on the detail, I can see what works, then erase and correct. To begin, I apply an undercoat; for this exhibition, for example, a matte black that serves as a base for everything else I apply. The slightest trace, even accidental, becomes an integral part of the painting, like the imprint of my shoes or my walker!