Overview
Thaddaeus Ropac Seoul presents Per Mano, an exhibition conceived in close collaboration with Georg Baselitz before his passing in April 2026. The show pays homage to the late artist’s prodigious oeuvre through two series of monotype paintings that epitomise the final decade of his practice: the Schatten (2020) and the Darkness Goldness works (2019), never before seen in Korea. It also marks the first time Georg Baselitz’s Schatten will be showcased since his exhibitions at the Sakıp Sabancı Museum, Istanbul (2024) and the Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao (2025). Both series reveal the artist’s sustained, eminently sensitive engagement with mortality since the seminal Avignon cycle he presented at the 56th Venice Biennale curated by Okwui Enwezor in 2015.
Thaddaeus Ropac Seoul presents Per Mano, an exhibition conceived in close collaboration with Georg Baselitz before his passing in April 2026. The show pays homage to the late artist’s prodigious oeuvre through two series of monotype paintings that epitomise the final decade of his practice: the Schatten (2020) and the Darkness Goldness works (2019), never before seen in Korea. It also marks the first time Georg Baselitz’s Schatten will be showcased since his exhibitions at the Sakıp Sabancı Museum, Istanbul (2024) and the Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao (2025). Both series reveal the artist’s sustained, eminently sensitive engagement with mortality since the seminal Avignon cycle he presented at the 56th Venice Biennale curated by Okwui Enwezor in 2015.
Georg Baselitz found inspiration for his Schatten [Shadow] works in Titian’s Archbishop Filippo Archinto (c. 1558, Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA). While the Renaissance master’s portrait is renowned for its striking veil, it is the curvilinear form of the shadow behind the figure that compelled Georg Baselitz and that he rehearses, upside down, on the left side of each canvas. A hallmark of his oeuvre since 1969, this inversion translates the artist’s unconventional approach to the image, ‘leading the viewer to experience a new way of seeing that induces an ontological shift,’ as curator Pamela Sticht has written. Art historians have likened Georg Baselitz’s compositional reversal to the iconography of Saint Peter’s Crucifixion, yet the artist sought precisely to eviscerate form of content, blasting the strict distinction between figuration and abstraction at a time when these were inextricable from Soviet-sanctioned Socialist Realism and Western escapism in a fractured Germany.
This is exemplified by the Schatten paintings wherein the central amalgam of strokes focuses the viewer’s attention on their particular treatment: the tangible velocity of Georg Baselitz’s original gestures and their de Kooning-like fluidity, emblematic of his late work; the unique formal variations of each monotype impression; or the constellations of blots that attest to his impulsive practice. In a highly physical process, the artist painted each work on a piece of unstretched canvas on the floor, before pressing the final primed canvas on top of it and forcefully transferring the image using a broom. Upon closer inspection, upside-down skulls materialise with varying degrees of resolution, harking back to the anamorphic memento mori in Holbein’s Ambassadors (1533; National Gallery, London). The aggressive geometry of the more defined skulls evinces the artist’s fascination with classical African statuary, in particular Songye sculpted power figures. A leitmotif from Georg Baselitz’s first Pandämonium works of the 1960s to his monumental Zero Ende sculpture (2013), the skull’s subtle manifestation turns the series into a potent, indeed prescient, vanitas.
In a different pictorial vein, Georg Baselitz’s Darkness Goldness paintings similarly grapple with the inexorable transience of life. Monumental golden hands emerge from pitch-dark grounds reminiscent of Lucas Cranach the Elder, imbuing the pictorial space with their sublime presence. In stark contrast with Georg Baselitz’s early depictions of amputated extremities in his provocatively repulsive P.D. Füße series (1960–63) and hypertrophied limbs in the ensuing Helden (1965–66), these works propose a more fragile – albeit equally expressive – take on the artist’s ageing hand. Art historian José María Parreño discerns ‘gnarled limbs, deformed almost beyond recognition by osteoarthritis; flesh macerated by age and labour, like the faces in Fautrier’s Otages.’ Each gilded hand flickers with a spectral quality, heightened by the artist’s monotype printing technique. As Georg Baselitz stated, ‘I wanted an apparition, something that appears out of the depth.’ Some appear skeletal, while others seem evanescent, gradually fading into the atmosphere of Georg Baselitz’s painterly universe or petering out into smears, drips and specks of paint in a poignant reflection on the artist’s legacy. As curator Bernard Blistène perceptively set forth, ‘Baselitz speaks to us […] of the painter’s relationship to the transcendence of his project.'
