Georg Baselitz’s artworks turn the world on its head, quite literally. Throughout his career, the iconic German painter has depicted his pet subjects – eagles, deer, downtrodden ‘heroes’, and Elke, his wife and lifelong muse – upside down on the canvas. What was once dismissed as a gimmick has, over the course of six decades, solidified into something much more, complicating the symbols that resurface again and again from the artist’s personal and political history.

In a new exhibition at Bergen’s Kode, this full history is laid out – not in paintings but in prints, which the artist has produced as an integral part of his artistic process since the mid-60s. Aptly titled Georg Baselitz: A Life in Print, the show sees the museum taken over by topsy-turvy cowboys, scratchy nudes, birds of prey, and corpselike self-portraits. It’s an appropriate setting: just a couple of minutes away lies Kode’s collection of similar, bleak images by the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch, one of Baselitz’s artistic heroes.

Baselitz’s prints shouldn’t just be considered a companion to the more famous paintings, suggests curator Cornelius Tittel, because they actually get to the heart of his obsessions in a way that painting can’t. He repeats something he was told by Baselitz’s longtime studio director, Detlev Gretenkort: “The printmaking reminds him of an architect who builds a house, and then, when the house is already built, he delivers the floorplan.” 

Baselitz himself expands on this idea in a conversation on printmaking, published alongside the museum show. “You can be sure that when you scratch a line into a resistant surface, this line – compared to a line in a drawing – will have a much greater finality about it,” he explains. This requires a lot to be figured out in advance, which Baselitz does throughout the year via painting and drawing. Only at the end of each year, in the winter months, does he tend to produce his prints, which he regards as “clarification of a form”. They are stark and stripped back, reduced to their most vital essence.

Before we go any further, let’s get something out of the way: Baselitz is a controversial figure. From declaring that “women don’t paint very well” (a supposedly ‘misrepresented’ claim from 2015), to making sculptures that resemble people throwing up Nazi salutes, to declaring that “there isn’t a better artist” than himself in a recent interview, he has a habit of expressing things in a way that rubs up against the limits of acceptability. He’s also not interested in pandering to contemporary trends.

“In the 60s, Baselitz’s contemporaries were all influenced by pop art,” Tittel adds. But while they were off making silkscreens, he was experimenting with Renaissance printing techniques in his own studio, pushing back against the impending commercialisation of the art world. While others were doing huge print runs, inspired by the likes of Andy Warhol, Baselitz was “hands on” – he had a printing press in his house, and Elke helped him hang the prints on a clothesline. “It was totally against the zeitgeist. You were basically seen as a reactionary, as someone who’s totally not modern. And that’s something he always says: looking back on his life, he realises he was never a modern painter. He never tried to be modern.”

As a result of not trying to “ride the wave” of modern trends, many of his prints have a kind of timeless quality that transcends tasteless quotes and newspaper headlines; they feel as relevant in 2025 as the day they were made. Scratched and scarred – alongside the accompanying bronze sculptures of amputated limbs and detached heads – they could equally have been carved into a cave wall by our ancient ancestors. “There’s something archaic,” Tittel agrees. “It’s very existential. It’s a whole life, and that’s powerful.”

Now 87, Baselitz is largely confined to a wheelchair (many of his new paintings even bear its wheelmarks) and “existential” seems an appropriate word for his current outlook. “He’s obsessed with thinking about the last works of great painters, how great painters approach[ed] their own death and demise and their waning power,” Tittel adds. “I think that’s very much on his mind. He’s so ambitious... and he’s not ashamed or afraid of showing the struggle. It’s now part of the work.”

At Kode, this feels tangible: decade by decade, Baselitz’s prints tend to grow slightly busier and more colourful, despite the preoccupation with destruction that runs throughout his career (as he once said of his upbringing in Nazi Germany and its aftermath: “I was born into a destroyed order, a destroyed landscape, a destroyed people, a destroyed society”). But in the exhibition’s final rooms, which hold works from his self-conscious ‘late period’, everything seems to drain away again, leaving just the bare bones. The “clarification” of a life, maybe. But even now, says Tittel: “It’s all about the next work. He just can’t stop, until his last breath, or until he can’t hold a brush or a pen. It’s like a curse.”

Georg Baselitz: A Life in Print is on show at Kode, Bergen, until February 22, 2026.