Rückfall

Georg Baselitz is widely recognized as one of the leading figures of German Neo-Expressionism, a movement that reshaped the artistic landscape of the 1980s. Born in Deutschbaselitz, near Dresden, Germany, he was rejected by the artistic establishment of East Germany’s socialist regime and relocated to West Berlin in 1958. Born Hans-Georg Kern, he adopted the name Georg Baselitz in 1961 after his hometown. From the outset of his career, Baselitz challenged established conventions and struggled to find acceptance within the society to which he belonged. Although he initially remained on the margins of the West German art scene, a scholarship to Florence in 1965 marked a turning point, allowing him to develop a distinctive artistic language and begin producing the series that would later become milestones in his oeuvre. It was during this period that many of the motifs that would come to define his work first emerged, including inverted imagery, monumental compositions, and vigorously rendered human figures. Baselitz began to gain international recognition after representing Germany at the 1980 Venice Biennale. Through works featuring fragmented body parts, such as heads and torsos, alongside recurring symbols including the eagle, an emblem of the German nation, he dismantled inherited ideological frameworks and forged a new artistic identity.

Installed in the lobby of Heungkuk Life Insurance Building, Rückfall (Relapse) is a painting created by Baselitz in 2014. The work belongs to the fifteen-part AVIGNON series, eight of whose black-background paintings were presented at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015. The inverted nude figure depicted in the composition is a self-portrait of the artist. Baselitz has cited artists such as Albrecht Dürer, Egon Schiele, Giorgio de Chirico, and Lucian Freud as sources of inspiration for the series. Throughout his career, Baselitz consistently overturned established visual orders and compositional conventions, drawing upon the entanglement of Germany’s turbulent history and his own personal memories. Repeatedly revisiting specific motifs over decades, he subjected them to continual experimentation and transformation. Until his passing in April 2026, he remained committed to this process of reinvention. Today, Baselitz is regarded as one of the artists most instrumental in shaping a new identity for German art in the second half of the twentieth century.