PRESENTATION: Georg Baselitz-Feet First

Georg Baselitz was born in 1938 in Hitler’s Germany, which was already on the path to the Second World War that left Europe in ruins. The experience of being born into a ‘destroyed order’ has remained a central theme of Baselitz’s art, from the beginning of his career in the early 1960s onwards. With the growing international interest in German art in the 1980s, Baselitz became one of the biggest names on the global contemporary art scene. He is known for the artistic power of his images, as well as his provocative statements on art, gender and politics.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Munch Museum Archive

Featuring over 80 paintings, drawings and sculptures, ranging from the early 1960s to recent works, “Feet First” is the most extensive exhibition of Georg Baselitz’s work ever mounted in Norway.  Baselitz’s subjects include the human figure in many different forms, haunting landscapes from his childhood, fragments of national symbolism, and in more recent years, his own ageing process. In 1969 he began painting subjects upside down as a way of emphasizing the abstract, purely painterly qualities in his figurative images. A central theme of this exhibition is Baselitz’s lifelong fascination with the art of Edvard Munch. In a number of images, Baselitz makes various references to Munch’s work, and credits him as a key influence in the development of modern German art. Despite the heaviness of his subject matter, Baselitz approaches Munch and other works from art history with a playful spirit. When you enter the exhibition, you may be surprised to see that many of the artworks appear to be hanging upside down. These pictures are, in fact, the most well-known feature of Georg Baselitz’s artistry. The first time he tried this was in 1969. For Baselitz, painting upside down was a way to open up an alternative path in modern art, between total abstraction and recognizable figures and objects. As he says: “It has to do with my belief that painting is not a mirror of reality. That is a myth. It’s about reinventing reality, and one of the best ways to destroy this myth is by painting the image upside down”. An important red thread through the whole exhibition is Georg Baselitz’s relationship to Edvard Munch. Since the start of his career, Baselitz has conducted an ongoing dialogue with Munch, whose head and body also crop up in many of Baselitz’s paintings and drawings. Baselitz is especially interested in Munch’s self-portraits, such as “The Night Wanderer” and “Self-Portrait by the Window”, and you can see echoes of these images, as well as the figure from “The Scream”, in some of the Baselitz works in this exhibition. Like Munch, Baselitz is an artist who, later in life, has depicted his own ageing process in his paintings. He has also expressed an interest in the way Munch painted claustrophobic spaces, emphasizing radiating multiple outlines and intense shadows. In the mid-2000s, Georg Baselitz started looking through old catalogues and sketchbooks of his own works. For an exhibition in 2006 he decided to paint new versions of some of these earlier images, which he called “Remixes”. These newer works had a fluid, transparent quality in the paintwork. Part of his inspiration came from Edvard Munch, who also repeatedly painted his own motifs in new ways. In his whole career, Baselitz has always taken a strong interest in the work of other artists, both from history and his own contemporaries. In many of his works you can see clear reflections or reimaginings of other artworks. In the exhibition these include the German expressionist Emil Nolde, American artists such as Willem de Kooning and Roy Lichtenstein, the Saxony landscape artist Ferdinand von Rayski, and paintings in the Soviet social realist genre. Baselitz made the wood sculpture “Greetings From Oslo” (1986) after his visit to Oslo in 1986, when he had a large exhibition at Henie Onstad Art Centre. While he was here, he also visited the old Munch Museum at Tøyen. Unfortunately, he tripped outside the museum and badly injured his knee. The sculpture, whose face also resembles the artist himself, was inspired by a waitress working in the museum restaurant. She tried to serve him a drink to calm his nerves, but appeared to be drunk herself, and made a mess. Baselitz described the whole awkward experience as like being ‘forced to his knees’ by the spirit of Edvard Munch.  In Georg Baselitz’s mysterious painting “Ekely” (2005), a pair of feet in black shoes hovers over a forest landscape. For a long time, Baselitz has been fascinated by a photograph of Edvard Munch in his home at Ekely which was taken on his 80th birthday in 1943. The old Munch sits in a chair surrounded by his works, with his hands on his knees. What particularly captured Baselitz’s attention was the missing feet at the bottom of the picture. In the background is a tree-lined path in Saxony where he used to play as a child. Thus, in this painting Baselitz brings together a nostalgic vision of his vanished past with his sense of himself as an artist who has carrying on Munch’s legacy. He places his feet – quite literally – in Munch’s shoes.

Photo: Georg Baselitz, Nachtessen in Dresden, 1983, Oil on canvas, © Georg Bazelitz 2025, Photo: Kunsthaus Zürich

Info: Curator: Jon-Ove Steihaug, Munch Museum, Edvard Munchs plass 1, Oslo, Norway, Duration: 15/2-4/5/2025, Days & Hours: Mon-Tue & Sun 10:00-18:00, Wed-Sat 10:00-21:00, www.munchmuseet.no/