The focus of the exhibition is on Baselitz as an artist who is deeply rooted in the history of European and American painting, and who is seen as the originator of an outstandingly inventive pictorial language.
The Fondation Beyeler is devoting its first exhibition in 2018 to the German painter, printmaker and sculptor Georg Baselitz (b. 1938 in Deutschbaselitz, Saxony), whose work occupies a central position in the art of our time. The exhibition, marking the artist’s eightieth birthday, takes the form of an extensive retrospective, comprising many of the most important paintings and sculptures created by Baselitz over the past six decades. These include loans from renowned public and private collections in Europe and the USA, some of which have not been seen in public for many years. The exhibition begins at the end of January 2018 at the Fondation Beyeler and will be shown in the summer in a modified form at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. Baselitz exhibitions are rare events in Switzerland and the USA. The last monographic exhibition of Baselitz’s work in Switzerland took place in 1990 at the Kunsthaus Zürich. In the USA, the present exhibition will be the first North American retrospective since the major show in 1995 at the Guggenheim Museum, which subsequently traveled to the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, and to further venues.