White Cube Bermondsey, London
A body falls through the sky, figures flail and thrash, while sagging skin and brittle limbs are scrawled on every work. This is the German painter’s last collection – and it’s both brutal and beautiful
On one wall, a body falls calmly through a serene blue sky. On the opposite, splat, it’s landed with a thud on the blood-spattered mud. You don’t need to be an expert in image analysis to figure out what Georg Baselitz’s final paintings are about: death was coming for him, and he knew it.
Baselitz died in April aged 88 years old. He was one of the most influential, recognisable painters of his generation, and this body of work was his last. It’s impossible to look at these paintings and drawings and not see them through the lens of death. They feel like a final attempt to come to terms with life and what it has meant, and a desperate, furious, chaotic reckoning with the end of it all.
