In front of the Heungkuk Life Insurance Building in Gwanghwamun, Seoul, the famous sculpture "Hammering Man" swings its hammer down at the appointed time. It is a work by Jonathan Borofsky that embodies laborers who work in silence. Inside the building, large sculptures and installation works catch the eye, and on the right wall hangs Georg Baselitz's 2014 large-scale painting "Lueckfall."

The upside-down human figure in the painting, seemingly falling while standing on its head, is a nude self-portrait by Baselitz, who was growing old and ill in his later years. His retrospective, which opened on the 13th at the Sehwa Museum of Art on the second and third floors of the Heungkuk Life Insurance Building, also stems from this long relationship. The Taekwang Group's Sehwa Art and Culture Foundation is known as one of the institutions that owns the largest number of Baselitz works in Korea. Of the 46 paintings, sculptures, and drawings in this retrospective, as many as 10 are from the foundation's collection. Baselitz's works fetch between 3 billion won and 5 billion won each, and the insured value of the exhibition reaches 150 billion won.



◆ The first museum retrospective since Baselitz's death

More than 100 days after the death of Georg Baselitz, the master of German Neo-Expressionism, more than 10 solo exhibitions of his work are being held around the world. On an island in Venice, Italy, where the Venice Biennale is in full swing, an exhibition of Baselitz's late golden paintings is also underway. But this comprehensive retrospective, spanning works from the 1960s to those painted just before his death, is the first of its kind at the Sehwa Museum of Art since his passing. An exhibition that had been prepared long in advance became a posthumous show after the artist's death. The museum is screening a 20-minute video interview recorded three weeks before he died. Baselitz said at the time, "I wonder whether Korean people will be surprised by or interested in my work," and added, "Korean painting has now come to stand shoulder to shoulder with European painting."

The exhibition opens with the earliest works, but it is not arranged in strict chronological order. The first piece to seize visitors' attention is the 1966 work "Two Divided Cows I." As the title suggests, it depicts two cows, but the canvas is cut by a horizontal line, leaving the noses misaligned. It is an early work from the "Frakturbilder" series, in which the upper and lower, or left and right, parts are deliberately offset. Next to it hangs "Finger Painting-Wing," a 1972 work that reduces an eagle to a fragmented "wing." In this way, the artist dismantled and fragmented Germany's heroic symbols, visualizing the burden carried by the defeated nation after World War II. He metaphorically expressed Germany's shattered pride and identity through broken, divided forms. These attempts became the foundation for the "inverted paintings" that became his signature in 1969.

Why did the master begin turning his paintings upside down? In interviews during his lifetime, he said, "I wanted to break away from existing rules and blind obedience," and added, "Then I came to think that the direction of up, down, left, and right is highly arbitrary." When a painting is created while lying flat on the floor, it loses direction, and the hierarchy of head, torso, arms, and legs disappears. He went on to point out, "If you ask children to draw their grandmother, they will draw her in a very similar way. Children do not know proportion or direction, so they begin drawing their grandmother as they imagine her, or in their own way, without being bound by convention."

His eternal companion and muse is his wife, Elke Kretzschmar. By the time you reach the second room, the 2019 series "Elke in Frankreich II" fills the walls on all sides. In his early years, he built up thick layers of paint on canvas, but in old age the materiality becomes noticeably lighter and more transparent. "Indigenous Art of That Time," from 2025, is a double-portrait series that depicts Elke and himself together in his final years. The spindly bed frame painted between them looks toward the loneliness of old age, which has moved close to death, and the finitude of life.

Most of the works are large-scale paintings tall enough to reach the museum ceiling. The artist once lamented, "In Germany, people said they were too big and that I was showing off because they were almost impossible to exhibit or sell, but I did not want them to become so-called 'sofa paintings' meant to hang in a living room." He added, "I decided to paint something less conventional and more aggressive."



◆ For the master, feet and legs ... symbols of an unstable self

As you move up to the third floor, the "Remix" series, which reinterprets earlier works from the 2000s onward, comes into view. A man in uniform is shown wearing women's shoes that evoke Frida Kahlo's wooden prosthetic leg, expressing a figure who has lost his center and is staggering amid the confusion of postwar Germany.

In Baselitz's work, feet and shoes are repeatedly emphasized. They are depicted as bandaged, broken, or cut off. Paradoxically, this reminds us that human beings are creatures who must live with their feet planted in the reality of the earth.

He once remarked, "We are not angels flying through the sky. We are simply northern people who live standing upright on the earth, and all we need for that is feet." His "inverted paintings" also turn the legs and shoes upward. They elevate the status of the feet to the level of the head, while at the same time lifting them away from the ground and suspending them in empty air. The precarious portrait of the modern person, who has lost direction and is kicking at empty air, is exquisitely expressed through this aesthetics of reversal.

The highlight of the exhibition is the golden 2026 series "More Than That," painted just months before he died. On a gold surface long associated with sanctity, eternity, and transcendence, he painted the thin, faint human body. It is a masterful work that portrays the human figure as sublime precisely because of its fragility, making it feel even more spiritual. The exhibition runs until December 27. Admission is 15,000 won.

[Lee Hyang-hwi, Senior Reporter]

This article has been translated by GripLabs Mingo AI.