A Confession of My Sins

Georg Baselitz marks his return to White Cube Bermondsey for the first time in eight years with the solo exhibition ‘A Confession of My Sins’. Comprising a large body of new work produced during an intensive year in the studio, the exhibition features large-scale paintings and a selection of works on paper in which the artist, now 86, surveys the past six and a half decades of his practice. From the vantage point of old age, Baselitz reflects upon a lifetime of lived experience and artistic invention, paying homage to key inspirations, motifs and subject matter, as well as unearthing...

Georg Baselitz in his studio at Ammersee, 2021. (c) Christoph Schaller

Georg Baselitz was born Hans-Georg Kern in 1938 in Deutschbaselitz, Saxony, an area that later became the German Democratic Republic, or DDR. In 1957, after his second term studying painting at the Academy of Fine and Applied Arts in East Berlin, he was sent down for ‘political immaturity’. Later that year, he moved to West Berlin’s Academy of Art, completing his studies th...

Georg Baselitz was born Hans-Georg Kern in 1938 in Deutschbaselitz, Saxony, an area that later became the German Democratic Republic, or DDR. In 1957, after his second term studying painting at the Academy of Fine and Applied Arts in East Berlin, he was sent down for ‘political immaturity’. Later that year, he moved to West Berlin’s Academy of Art, completing his studies there in 1962. It was during this period that he adopted the surname Baselitz, after his birthplace.