His latest paintings do not depict heroes. And are yet heroic Cornelius Tittel reviews Georg Baselitz’s last series of paintings

Baselitz brings his life’s work to a close with the exhibition “Eroi d’Oro” in Venice: uncompromising, steeped in art history and fearless.

The blind spots in Edvard Munch’s work, the loss of control in Otto Dix’s, the canvases of Mark Rothko that appear as though they have been scraped – Georg Baselitz had studied them all: the last paintings of his beloved colleagues, all the different ways of bringing a life’s work to a close. He made his Biennale presentation in 2015 the official launch of his late work and remarked at the time that he enjoyed seeing “which hurdles I can still jump over, which bridges I can still cross”.

The joy had faded in recent years, even though the power of his paintings, series after series, image after image, had not waned. The intense phases of painting had become too exhausting for him to have any reserves left for coquetry. With him in a wheelchair, bent down towards the canvas on the floor, painting had become a highly concentrated final battle – against the decline of his own strength, and only for as long as his breath held out. Increasingly, the tyre tracks of his wheelchair became part of the composition – a ruthless exposure of the conditions of production, which, in a paradoxical twist, nevertheless seemed to spell out ACTION and was reminiscent of Jackson Pollock’s elliptical drippings.