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Georg Baselitz: A Life in Print A review of his exhibition at the Kode Art Museum

20 October 2025

By Joe Lloyd

Georg Baselitz is not shy about his position in the pantheon. The day before the present exhibition at Kode opened, he told the Times: “There isn’t a better artist than myself.” By the evidence of this capacious survey of his work in print, he may be right. In the catalogue, the curator, Cornelius Tittel – who is also editor-in-chief at Blau International and creative director at Die Welt – recounts an unsolicited phone call with Baselitz after his 2021 Centre Pompidou retrospective. They both regretted that the exhibition was not even bigger. “And it’s also a shame”, said the artist, “that museums are no longer interested in prints.”

A Life in Print aims to be a corrective. It is the most comprehensive survey of Baselitz’s printmaking to date, with 244 prints executed between 1964 and 2024. This labyrinthine exhibition features wall after wall hung with prints of sundry sizes, all presented in identical wooden frames. The same motifs emerge again and again: majestic deer and fearsome eagles, dark German forests and lacerating portraits. All will be familiar to those who know Baselitz’s painting. But the variety is such that Baselitz frequently manages to surprise.

Born a year before the outbreak of the second world war, Baselitz responded to his childhood experience of destruction by creating works that harked back to German art before National Socialism. His early works featured grotesque figures formed from spatters and sputters of paint, gesturing both to the grotesquery of prewar German expressionism and the painterly melange of American abstract painting. He was viewed as an enfant terrible from the off, expelled from art school in East Berlin for “sociopolitical immaturity”, then accused of “obscenity” after his first solo exhibition in the west in 1963.

The next spring he was invited to the etching workshop at Schloss Wolfsburg, where his earnest engagement with printmaking began. The following year he spent six months at Villa Romana in Florence, where he became besotted with mannerism – the tail end of the Italian Renaissance, often dismissed for its artifice and distorted figures – and, in particular, the etchings of Parmigianino. While contemporaries such as Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke experimented with screen printing, Baselitz adopted the print techniques of the old masters: drypoint etchings, aquatint, woodcuts and linocuts. In the decades since, Baselitz has used these mediums to revisit the subject matter of his painted work, including his infamous upside-down works.