Georg Baselitz Ein Bein von Manet aus Paris

My past is art history and the time I lived through is the time of an artist. And now that I’m very old, I have a big overview. It no longer has anything to do with strategy, as I used to use it, but I realise that art moves around me. Today more than 40 years ago, much more. 

 

— Georg Baselitz

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Ein Bein von Manet aus Paris is an exhibition of monumental paintings, intimate works on paper and a bronze sculpture created by Georg Baselitz over the course of the last year. The paintings represent a continuation of the now 87-year-old artist's perpetual grapple with the conventions of portraiture, returning to the two subjects who have marked his seven decades of artistic production more than any other: himself and his wife, Elke. 

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Working on the floor, in these new works, the artist used a walking frame to navigate the canvases, turning the tangle of lines made by its wheels in the paint into a central compositional element. Demonstrating this novel mark-making technique, the new paintings bear witness to Baselitz's unrelenting impulse to experiment.

Baselitz has long returned to the same familiar subjects in his portraits – namely himself and his wife – in order, counterintuitively, to draw attention away from the subject and towards the act of painting itself. The technical and compositional innovations with which he has marked the second half of the 20th century have all been explored through portraiture, as have changing historical and personal contexts.

Warum nicht zwei, 2025
Oil on canvas
460 x 300 cm (181.1 x 118.11 in)

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The couple are now pallid spectral figures, often on grounds of grey-black, ‘like the non-colour of Manet’s The Fifer, which eliminates depth and gives the white that defines Baselitz’s motif the ghostly aspect of ectoplasmic bodies’, as curator Bernard Blistène writes in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition.

 

Verschieden von den anderen, 2025

Oil on canvas

300 x 240 cm (118.11 x 94.49 in)

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Several threads, like several narratives, are superimposed and woven together. The painting becomes a morphogenesis, a structure in constant mutation, an increasingly complex ongoing narrative, similar to a fragile organism brought to life. The painting becomes an echo of the story that the painter Baselitz, after so many years, could never bring himself to abandon.

 

— Bernard Blistène, A Traced Dance, 2025

Traumflug sex, 2025
Oil on canvas
300 x 450 cm (118.1 x 177.17 in)

As his canvases became larger over the years, painting on the floor became increasingly fundamental to Baselitz’s method, and in works as early as the early 1990s, his footprints and the outlines of silhouetted tins of paint that he had placed on the canvas while he worked form an integral textural element in the surfaces of his paintings. In his recent works, as well as ever-denser clouds of footprints that flurry around his figures as the artist manoeuvres himself in small, precise steps around their contours, a novel element emerges to trouble the limit between figure and ground, as well as between painter and painting.

Volksmusik war indigen, 2024
Oil on canvas
300 x 450 cm (118.11 x 177.17 in)

Baselitz uses a walking frame to move around his canvases, ploughing its wheels through the still-wet paint and leaving their prints on the sombre grounds as networks of lines. In some works, they form concentric webs that orbit the figures; in others they lead off the edge of the paintings, as if ready to carry the apparition-like images away with them. Destructive in undoing or crossing out the figures, and yet unifying in their doing so, the linear imprints become wrinkles or scars: as Blistène writes, ‘as if one hand has destroyed what the other has built’.

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Through the addition of the wheel prints in the paintings on view, Baselitz associates himself with the 20th-century artists who used vehicles to augment or obfuscate their own hand, or to channel visually the intangibility of time or energy, like Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage’s Automobile Tire Print (1953) or Joseph Beuys’s Is It About a Bicycle (1982). His use of the walker also inscribes him in the history of artists who, faced with physical constraints as they aged, have invented new tools for themselves, like Henri Matisse’s bamboo stick. The walker adopted by the artist out of necessity becomes, then, more aligned with the ‘living paintbrushes’ of Yves Klein’s Anthropometries.

Waren die Indigenen wirklich diejenigen, 2025
Oil on canvas
450 x 300 cm (177.17 x 118.11 in)

Feet and legs have been a recurring theme since Baselitz’s early works, symbolising a tactile connection with the earth: ‘when I’m painting on the floor, the contact downward – feeling for what is under it – is really important’, he explained in 2017. The wheel prints become, then, an extension of this visual vocabulary. Even the title of the exhibition, ‘A leg by Manet from Paris’, at once playfully quips on Manet’s difficulty painting legs and feet, while acknowledging the amputation of one of the French painter’s own feet at the end of his life.

 

Im Wald ein Wesen gefunden, 2025

Oil on canvas

460 x 300 cm (181.1 x 118.11 in)

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At the heart of the exhibition is a new bronze sculpture, which creates a tangible echo of this ‘contact downwards’, bearing down firmly through its two legs and the four further leg-like buttresses that encircle it. Carving its form directly from a single piece of wood before casting it in bronze, Baselitz uses the same technique here as in his very first sculpture, made for the 1980 Venice Biennale, which he carved with an axe and chisel.

For the sculpture on view, Baselitz took inspiration as much from the formal dynamism and elongated silhouettes of north-east Nigerian Mumuye sculptures – which are often, like Baselitz’s, carved from single pieces of wood – as from the twisting limbs and compositional tension characteristic of Mannerist art. Bringing together these diverse references, the sculpture in the exhibition also visually recalls the figures in the paintings: elegant and slender, long-legged and yet seemingly suspended.

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It was a dream that inspired Baselitz to paint himself and his wife once again with a new evanescent quality in 2015. Over the course of the last decade, he has returned almost compulsively to the motif, with his light, sometimes effervescent treatment of paint suggesting his ageing body and that of his wife. In the drawings on view, the same spindly figures with their exaggerated limbs found in the paintings are instead rendered in red or black ink: a medium that equally contributes to a disarming sense of corporeal fragility.

 

Ohne Titel, 2025
Ink pen on paper
58.7 x 79.7 cm (23.11 x 31.38 in)

Baselitz is remarkable in his transformation of the obstacles imposed by age into opportunities for renewal in a way that is at once poignant, witty, and, as Blistène once put it, ‘exhales the pleasure of painting’. The exhibition at Thaddaeus Ropac Paris Pantin presents a vision that is – as Andreas Zimmermann has commented about Baselitz’s recent work – ‘filigree and powerful at once: a typical Baselitz paradox.’

Ohne Titel, 2024
Ink pen on paper
51 x 64.8 cm (20.08 x 25.51 in)

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Learn more about the artist  

 

Download the press release 

Ein Bein von Manet aus Paris is accompanied by an exhibition catalogue with a text by Bernard Blistène.

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Inaugural exhibition at Thaddaeus Ropac Milan

 

Georg Baselitz & Lucio Fontana

L’aurora viene

20 September—21 November 2025

Milan

 

Thaddaeus Ropac Milan will open on 20 September 2025 with an exhibition of works by Georg Baselitz and Lucio Fontana, retracing Baselitz’s longstanding and ongoing engagement with the work of the Argentine-Italian master. The Milan gallery’s inaugural exhibition is a dialogue between Baselitz and Fontana, with loans from the Baselitz studio and the loan of a nucleus of works from the Fondazione Lucio Fontana. Fontana has played an important role in the work of Baselitz, who also has a studio in Italy, and Fontana lived and worked for most of his life in Milan, where the first exhibition of his works was held in 1931.

 

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