In the autumn of his eighty-eight years, wheelchair-bound and wielding a long paintbrush attached to a stick, Georg Baselitz laying canvas across his studio floor was not merely an artist adapting to physical decay. It was a master engaging in a desperate, triumphant wrestling match with gravity.
Following his passing in April 2026, Back Again at White Cube Bermondsey stands not as a retrospective curated by onlookers, but as a self-reckoning structured by the artist himself. The exhibition gathers a furious, beautiful suite of 30 final works created between 2024 and 2025—a definitive summation of a career spanning more than six decades.
The Inverted Universe: Reclaiming the Lost Instrument
Since 1969, Baselitz’s signature motif—the completely inverted figure—served to strip narrative away, forcing the viewer to confront raw pigment, gesture, and weight. In Back Again, that inversion sheds its formal detachment and takes on a deeply existential urgency.
In Elkes Geburtstag am Teichdamm (2025), the artist returns to the image of his wife, muse, and partner of over 60 years, Elke Kretzschmar.
The motif of the eagle—first sketched by a 15-year-old Hans-Georg Kern in 1953 as a symbol of war-torn landscapes—returns in Objekt naiv (2024). Plunging downward in dark crimson strokes against a sky-blue field, the falling predator embodies a lifetime spent defying political systems and art historical expectations.
Gold, Ink, and the Dance of Annihilation
The emotional peak of the exhibition arrives with Habe ich indische Tänze gesehen (I Saw Indian Dances) (2025). Here, the Hindu goddess Durga is rendered in shimmering gold paint against a deep, pitch-black void. The multiple limbs of the deity pirouette through paint splatters and wheel-track impressions left by Baselitz’s chair, holding destructive and creative forces in a single continuous movement.
In these golden works, Baselitz treats gold paint not as a decorative embellishment, but as an ultimate horizon. As the artist observed shortly before his death, black represents the beginning of an aesthetic intention, while gold marks its inevitable end.
The Puppeteer’s Tears: A Legacy Secured
In July 2025, while designing 15 minimalist cardboard and crinkled-metal puppets for Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du Soldat in Salzburg, Baselitz wept as he watched his jointed creations move across the stage. He recognized that the forms he set in motion—pulled by strings, gravity, and chance—had achieved a life beyond his own control.
The canvases at White Cube operate on that exact revelation. Whether through the scrawled outlines of aging limbs, the frantic wings of falling eagles, or the cosmic dance of golden goddesses, Back Again delivers an uncompromising conclusion. The artist has stepped away from the canvas, leaving behind a body of work that continues to defy gravity, time, and mortality.
The Georg Baselitz: Back Again solo exhibition runs at White Cube Bermondsey in London through the autumn season.