The dance of memory

“I have painted an incredible number of pictures over the course of more than 60 years. Now that I am more or less at the end of my painting activity, I thought it was time to draw some kind of conclusion. A summation of the pictures I have made over the years. I wanted them on a gold ground – real gold – on which to create as refined, sensitive and complete a drawing as possible of my wife Elke and myself, as individual nudes or as a couple. And I succeeded. I wanted them to be large, because large forms are needed when there is something important to say… and besides, I love formats that do not end up hanging behind a sofa!”
Thus Georg Baselitz, speaking about himself in a video, accompanies visitors through the two galleries of the Fondazione Cini on San Giorgio Island, which house the sixteen large canvases in the exhibition Georg Baselitz – Eroi d’Oro. The title deliberately evokes – almost as if closing the circle of a life devoted to art – one of the artist’s earliest and most celebrated series. “In 1965, I painted what became known as the Heroes paintings. They were imaginary characters, not realistic, not based on real models, but fictional figures inspired by the heroic characters in novels about the Russian Civil War. This series dominated my work for a long time and continues to do so.”

The exhibition on the island of San Giorgio has thus become a true testament exhibition by the great German artist, who died on 30 April 2026, just days after the Venetian opening. He was 88. His celebrated upside-down portraits – which force viewers to look more closely at the work – appear here larger, more fragile, fascinating and disturbing than ever. Some are traced with a single black line, almost like ink on a golden sheet, with echoes of Japanese art. Bodies that conceal nothing of the passage of time. Others are accompanied by vivid, energetic brushstrokes of colour.
“I thought of de Kooning, who said that flesh is the reason painting was invented,” the artist explains, “and I made deliberate, colourful flourishes, as a borrowing, a devotion, like a farewell, a leave-taking.” Canvases as large as three by four metres attract the eye while simultaneously instilling a sense of anguish at the end of time. Luca Massimo Barbero, the exhibition’s curator, describes them in the catalogue as “a dance of the memory of the body”: bodies floating against golden backgrounds with multiple artistic references, but here without “an ostentatious celebratory monumentality, rather a means of representing the intimate solitude and human fragility in the face of the end.”