At a glance
Baselitz turned the act of breaking and overturning into a new way of painting: more than 60 years of figures, violence, memory and radical experimentation — now seen through the often-overlooked importance of his prints.
Meet the artist
Why go
You'll see
Pace of visit
Don't miss
Artlovers Tip
Don't focus only on the upside-down figures. Ask yourself why Baselitz turned them upside down: the gesture forces you to stop reading the image as a subject and start looking at it as paint, line, composition and physical gesture.
Artlovers mood: Radical · Raw · Challenging · Energetic · Provocative
Inside the exhibition
Period
Origin
Georg Baselitz. AVANTI! is presented at the Museo Novecento in Florence from 25 March to 13 September 2026, in collaboration with the artist's studio. Curated by Sergio Risaliti in collaboration with Daniel Blau, it brings together approximately 170 paintings, prints and sculptures spanning more than sixty years.
The exhibition takes its title — AVANTI! — from the idea of moving forward through rupture. Baselitz's artistic language was shaped by the experience of growing up in Germany amid the destruction left by the Second World War. Rather than trying to restore a harmonious artistic tradition, he used destruction and historical trauma as material for reinventing figurative art.
His famous decision to paint figures upside down, developed from the late 1960s onwards, is central to this process. By reversing the image, Baselitz deliberately disrupts its narrative content: instead of immediately recognising a person, landscape or object, the viewer is forced to confront the painting itself — its colours, forms, surface and gesture.
What makes AVANTI! particularly valuable is its attention to printmaking. Woodcuts, linocuts, etchings and other works on paper run alongside paintings and sculptures, demonstrating that graphic techniques were not secondary exercises but an important part of Baselitz's thinking and experimentation.
The exhibition also explores recurring subjects and bodies of work including inverted figures, the Heroes series and the Remix works, where Baselitz revisits and transforms earlier images. The dialogue between prints, paintings and sculpture makes his constant process of repetition and reinvention particularly visible.
Worth travelling for?
Florence is not simply the location of the exhibition. Baselitz has a deep personal and artistic connection with the city.
In 1965, after winning the Villa Romana Prize, he spent around six months in Florence. During this period he became fascinated by the city's anti-classical and expressive Renaissance traditions, particularly Pontormo, Rosso Fiorentino and Domenico Beccafumi. He returned to Florence several times between 1976 and 1981, and in 1988 had a solo exhibition at Palazzo Vecchio.
This connection creates one of the most interesting aspects of AVANTI!: Baselitz's radical modernism can be read alongside the distorted bodies and anti-classical energy of 16th-century Florentine painting.
★★★★★ One of the strongest contemporary-art exhibitions in Florence in 2026.
The real reason to go is not simply to see Baselitz's famous upside-down paintings. AVANTI! reveals the artist as a restless experimenter, particularly through his prints, and Florence adds a fascinating historical layer to his radical approach to the human figure.
