Image: Georg Baselitz. Museo Novecento, Florence
The Museo Novecento in Florence is showing 'Baselitz. AVANTI!' until 13 September 2026. Opened on 25 March and realised with the artist's studio, it is the first wide-ranging exhibition project in Italy to place engraving, a fundamental and less explored part of Georg Baselitz's practice, at its centre. Around 170 works are spread over the museum's three floors, among them prints, paintings and sculptures, across more than sixty years of work.
The exhibition is now being seen after the artist's death. Baselitz died on 30 April 2026 at the age of 88, five weeks into the run; the news was reported that day by Artribune, Il Post and Exibart among others, and was announced through his gallery at the family's request. He was born Hans-Georg Kern in Kamenz in 1938 and grew up among the ruins of the Second World War, which the museum identifies as a founding matrix of a body of work built on destruction and on historical, cultural and social catastrophe. A pioneering and non-conformist figure of the post-war decades, he pressed for a radical renewal of artistic language, and his inversion of the image remains the best-known of his gestures: a symbolic and conceptual act that unsettles looking and obliges the viewer to begin again. The selection stresses his conception of art as process, transformation and subversive gesture rather than reassuring harmony.
The museum also sets out Baselitz's long connection with Florence, a city it describes as decisive for his formation. He spent roughly six months there in 1965 after winning the Villa Romana prize, encountering the anti-classical and expressionist art of the Italian sixteenth century and in particular Rosso Fiorentino, Domenico Beccafumi and Jacopo da Pontormo. He returned repeatedly between 1976 and 1981, up to his solo exhibition of 1988 in the Sala d'Arme of the Palazzo Vecchio.
One event remains in the accompanying programme on works on paper. On Tuesday 8 September at 6 p.m. the museum hosts the last meeting in a cycle organised with the Fondazione Il Bisonte, 'Il valore del multiplo', with Silvia Bellotti, Simone Guaita and Nicola Maggi. It starts from the book 'Collezionare opere su carta', published by Collezione da Tiffany with the scientific contribution of the Fondazione Il Bisonte, and considers the historical, cultural and collecting significance of graphic art.
The museum occupies the former Spedale delle Leopoldine on piazza Santa Maria Novella 10 and is dedicated to Italian art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It opened on 24 June 2014 and draws on the city's civic collections, including the Alberto Della Ragione collection, donated to Florence in the wake of the 1966 flood, and the Ottone Rosai bequest, which passed to the Comune in 1963 through the wishes of his widow Francesca Fei and his brother Oreste. While 'Baselitz. AVANTI!' is on, the permanent collection is displayed at the Centro Culturale CAMBIO in Castelfiorentino until 20 September 2026.
The museum is open 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. every day except Thursday, with last admission an hour before closing. 'Baselitz. AVANTI!' closes on Sunday 13 September 2026, and the ground-floor rooms of the Leopoldine reopen on 26 September with an exhibition of some twenty-five paintings by Victor Man, curated by Sergio Risaliti, running to 7 March 2027.
