GEORG BASELITZ @ Kode Art Museum, Bergen, Norway

Kode is presenting a major retrospective of Georg Baselitz, one of the leading artists of our time, celebrating six decades of the artist’s printmaking.

A Life in Print is the most extensive presentation of Baselitz’s prints to date and will be at display until February 2026.


Since the 1960s, Georg Baselitz (b. 1938) has been turning the world upside down with his art, and printmaking has always been an integral part of the German artist’s practice.
Featuring nearly 250 works, A Life in Print will be the most comprehensive presentation of Baselitz’s prints ever assembled.

«It is a show that I wanted to witness, a show that had to happen,» states the 87-year-old artist.
«Throughout my career, printmaking has been of utmost importance to me. It is very exciting to see it taking centre stage for once.»

Motifs from the past 60 years

A Life in Print, which has been curated by Cornelius Tittel in collaboration with the Baselitz Archives, will present all the main themes and motifs from Baselitz’s career, ranging from “The Heroes” of the mid-1960s through to his iconic depictions of eagles and his many portraits of his wife Elke.

Grouping works thematically, to reveal Baselitz’s recurrent returns to the same motifs over his long career, the exhibition will range from the artist’s first prints from the 1960s, etchings with aquatint that were inspired by Mannerist etchings he had seen in Florence, to recent etchings from 2024 that revisit the eagle motif and hark back to drawings first made by a teenaged Baselitz in the small East German town of Deutschbaselitz.

Baselitz has been a key figure on the international art scene since the 1960s. Renowned for his contributions to German Neo-expressionism, he is celebrated for his paintings, sculptures and his prints. His distinctive style often features distorted figures and inverted subjects.

Born in 1938, during Nazi rule, Baselitz draws on German culture, history and artistic traditions, with his work frequently reflecting broader societal and artistic challenges. He began exploring different print techniques in 1964 and has since considered them an integral part of his practice.

At a time when many of his peers favoured newer methods like offset and screen printing to create what were often large print runs, Baselitz rejected the zeitgeist by exploring centuries-old techniques such as drypoint, aquatint and woodcut. He explored large formats and small print runs.

The exhibition will invite visitors to decode Baselitz’s artistic references, from the Mannerist painters to Edvard Munch (1863-1944)—one of Baselitz’s acknowledged heroes.

Notably, Kode holds some of the world’s most significant collections of Munch’s prints and paintings, as well as Nikolai Astrup (1880-1928), and in recent years has presented several exhibitions dedicated to prints by artists such as Pablo Picasso, Helen Frankenthaler, Ed Ruscha, as well as group exhibitions.

The first book to fully explore six decades of Georg Baselitz’s groundbreaking print work will be published by Skira to coincide with the exhibition. Published in close collaboration with Kode and the Baselitz Archive, the volume is both a visual celebration and a scholarly resource.