Florence's Museo Novecento dedicates major retrospective to Georg Baselitz: 170 works brought together to reread printmaking

From March 25 to September 13, 2026, the Museo Novecento in Florence presents Baselitz. AVANTI!, an exhibition curated by Sergio Risaliti dedicated to Georg Baselitz, among the protagonists of international contemporary art. The project, realized in collaboration with the artist’s studio, represents the first major exhibition in Italy focusing on a central and less frequently explored dimension of his practice:printmaking.

The exhibition is spread over the three floors of the Museo Novecento and brings together about 170 works including prints, paintings and sculptures. The itinerary aims to restore the complexity of a research developed over more than sixty years, highlighting the coherence and at the same time the radicality of a language that has crossed different seasons and contexts. The selected works document the variety of themes addressed by Baselitz and reaffirm a conception of art understood as process and transformation, based on a gesture that rejects any form of conciliatory harmony.

Born in 1938 in Germany as Hans-Georg Kern, Baselitz grew up in the ruins of World War II. The experience of destruction, as well as the historical, cultural and social tragedy of the twentieth century, becomes the structural matrix of his work. A pioneering figure after World War II, the artist promoted a radical renewal of figurative language, questioning the academic order and rejecting pre-established models. The reversal of images, a practice that made him internationally known, takes on symbolic and conceptual value: turning the figure upside down means subtracting the image from an immediate reading and forcing the viewer to redefine his or her point of observation.

The exhibition also draws attention to Baselitz’s relationship with Florence, a city that played a decisive role in his career. In 1965 the artist stayed for about six months in the Tuscan capital after being awarded a Villa Romana scholarship. During that period he came into contact with the anti-classical and expressionist tradition of 16th-century Italy, particularly Rosso Fiorentino, Domenico Beccafumi and Jacopo da Pontormo. Between 1976 and 1981 he returned to Florence several times, until his 1988 solo exhibition in the Sala d’Arme of Palazzo Vecchio. Baselitz. AVANTI! is thus proposed as an opportunity for an overall rereading of the artist’s work, with specific attention to the practice of printmaking as a field of autonomous experimentation.

Florence's Museo Novecento dedicates major retrospective to Georg Baselitz: 170 works brought together to reread printmaking

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