Georg Baselitz - AVANTI! A Final Look at a Radical Master

There are artists who follow the history of art, and there are artists who deliberately turn it upside down. Georg Baselitz belongs to the second category.

Until 13 September 2026, Florence's Museo Novecento presents Georg Baselitz. AVANTI!, a major exhibition dedicated to one of the most radical figures of post-war European art. Bringing together around 170 works across prints, paintings and sculptures, the exhibition spans more than six decades of artistic research and offers an unusually rich opportunity to understand the complexity of Baselitz's practice.

What makes the exhibition particularly fascinating is its focus on printmaking, a fundamental but often less explored part of Baselitz's career. Rather than treating his graphic work as secondary to painting, AVANTI! places it at the centre of the story, revealing the extraordinary freedom with which the artist moved between techniques, materials and images.

Baselitz was born Hans-Georg Kern in Germany in 1938 and grew up surrounded by the ruins and psychological aftermath of the Second World War. That experience became deeply embedded in his artistic language. His work was never interested in harmony or easy beauty. Instead, he developed a deliberately unsettling form of figuration, one that challenged the conventions of representation and continually forced the viewer to reconsider what an image could be.

Few gestures in contemporary painting are as recognisable as his decision to turn figures upside down. Beginning in 1969, Baselitz transformed the inverted image into a radical artistic principle. By removing the familiar orientation of the subject, he encouraged viewers to stop reading the painting simply as a representation and instead concentrate on colour, gesture, surface and composition. The image becomes unstable, and that instability becomes the point.

At the Museo Novecento, this philosophy unfolds across three floors. The exhibition brings together recurring motifs from Baselitz's long career: fragmented bodies, couples, erotic figures, portraits of his wife Elke, hands and feet, and the eagle, an image loaded with questions of German identity and history. His works constantly move between the personal and the historical, between memory and invention.

The relationship with Florence makes the exhibition even more meaningful. Baselitz spent around six months in the city in 1965 after receiving a Villa Romana scholarship, encountering the anti-classical energy of artists such as Rosso Fiorentino, Pontormo and Beccafumi. Florence therefore became more than a temporary location in his career; it became part of the visual vocabulary through which he challenged the traditions of European art.

Perhaps this is what makes AVANTI! so rewarding. It does not simply present Baselitz as the artist of the upside-down figure. It reveals a much broader and more experimental practice, in which painting, sculpture and printmaking continually influence one another. The exhibition shows an artist who spent more than sixty years refusing to settle into a single language.

For anyone interested in contemporary painting, this is an exhibition worth seeing before it closes. And for collectors, it offers something particularly valuable: the opportunity to look beyond the most famous images of a major artist and discover the depth, experimentation and persistence behind them.

If you are in Florence before 13 September, make time for Baselitz. AVANTI! is not simply a survey of a remarkable career; it is an encounter with an artist who spent his entire life challenging the rules of the image and proving that sometimes the best way forward is to turn everything upside down.