Georg Baselitz’s Last Paintings: Inside “Meine Schule” at Gagosian New York

When Georg Baselitz died in April 2026, he left behind a body of late work that he had already begun to frame as a summation. This autumn that framing becomes an exhibition. “Meine Schule” opens at Gagosian, 555 West 24th Street, New York, on 12 November 2026 and runs until 23 January 2027. It is the gallery’s first presentation of his work since his death, and it brings together his last completed paintings, his final sculpture and a second late sculpture.

An exhibition designed by the artist

According to Gagosian, the show was conceived and designed by Baselitz himself and is curated by Richard Calvocoressi, the scholar and Gagosian director who has written about his work for many years. It also marks more than a quarter of a century of collaboration between the painter and the gallery. Two sculptures stand alongside the canvases: Strawinsky (2026), his last, and 1965 (2024).

“My School”: a return to Deutschbaselitz

Baselitz was born Hans-Georg Kern in 1938 in Deutschbaselitz, Saxony, and later took the village’s name as his own. The exhibition title points straight back there. Two paintings from the Meine Schule series, neither shown before, return to his earliest memory from the 1940s: the village schoolhouse where his father taught and where the family lived during the war. Gagosian describes the canvases as showing schoolchildren — one painting of the boys, one of the girls — lined up beneath a Nazi propaganda banner that was hung on the building on official occasions.

It is a striking final gesture. Baselitz built his reputation in the 1960s by refusing the comfortable silences of post-war Germany; his early “heroes” and “fracture” paintings were among the most uncomfortable images of their time. To end with the schoolyard of his childhood, and with the word “school” — which also evokes an artistic lineage — closes a circle he had been drawing for six decades.

Gold grounds and inverted figures

Since 1969 Baselitz painted his motifs upside down, a strategy that forced viewers to look at a painting as paint rather than as a story. The late works keep that inversion. In the other paintings on view, he and his wife Elke appear as fine, ink-like black outlines floating on lush gold grounds, each interrupted by a burst of colourful impasto that the artist called, in his own words, “a misplaced Willem de Kooning.” The phrase captures his late tone: self-aware, art-historical and mischievous at once.

The gold grounds connect these canvases to Eroi d’Oro, his exhibition at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice (May–September 2026), which Baselitz himself described as a summing-up of his practice. Seen together, the Venice and New York presentations form a two-part farewell.

Why it matters

• Historical weight: these are among the last paintings by one of the defining figures of post-war German art, shown in an arrangement he planned.
• A complete arc: the series links his final years directly to the wartime childhood that shaped his confrontational early work.
• For painters: the late canvases are a masterclass in economy — line, ground and a single gestural interruption carrying an entire composition.

Visiting information

Gagosian, 555 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011. 12 November 2026 – 23 January 2027; opening reception Thursday 12 November, 6–8pm. Open Tuesday–Saturday, 10am–6pm. The opening coincides with the inaugural Art Week NYC (11–14 November), so expect a busy Chelsea. See Gagosian’s exhibition page, our Meine Schule listing for contacts and social links, and Upcoming Art Exhibitions in Leading Galleries for more openings worldwide.