Georg Baselitz The Inverted Master
By Patricia Li
This autumn, the country hosts the first major retrospective of German painter and sculptor Georg Baselitz (1938–2026) following his passing in April. Split across the Sehwa Museum of Art and Thaddaeus Ropac art gallery in Seoul, the concurrent exhibitions deliver a beautifully layered dual portrait of one of postwar art’s most uncompromising visionaries. Rather than operating as disparate entities, the shows engage in an elegant dialogue: Sehwa surveys six decades of radical practice forged out of wartime ruin, while Per Mano at the gallery space unveils a private final chapter steeped in mortality, grief and the fragile, physical trace of the artist’s hand.
Born near Dresden, Baselitz came of age bearing the psychological scars of a fractured post-war Germany. Rejecting both East German Socialist Realism and detached Western abstraction, he forged a fiercely independent visual lexicon designed to disrupt inherited ways of seeing. As curator Norman Rosenthal notes in the upcoming exhibition catalogue, Baselitz’s oeuvre acts as a prism for Europe’s wartime trauma, a defining artistic concern that finds a poignant, visceral echo on the divided Korean Peninsula.
Housed within the sleek glass monoliths of Seoul’s financial district, the Sehwa Museum retrospective brings together 46 seminal works. It opens with Two Cows Divided I (1966), a cornerstone of Baselitz’s Fracture Paintings series. A sharp horizontal slash cleaves the canvas, dismantling the pastoral animal imagery once co-opted by Nazi propaganda. The painting stands as a masterclass in symbolic tension, testing how much ideological violence an image can absorb before its inherited meaning collapses.
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From the institutional gravity of the museum, the narrative transitions fluidly to the gallery. Per Mano offers a quiet, archive-led counterpoint, presenting 15 delicate works across two rooms. The exhibition showcases ethereal transfer monotypes, which Baselitz regarded as fully realised works rather than preliminary studies, alongside his rarely seen Schatten (Shadow Paintings) from 2020.
