Georg Baselitz’s final vision takes bronze form at Gagosian

A large bronze figure sits in quiet contemplation, its surface burnished to a luminous white patina that catches light like aged marble. This is “Strawinsky,” the last sculpture that Georg Baselitz arranged to be completed before his death in April, and it arrives now as a meditation on absence, legacy and the generative power of artistic vision that extends beyond a single lifetime.

The work emerges from an unexpected source: Baselitz’s designs for marionettes and sets created for a 2025 production of Igor Stravinsky’s “Histoire du Soldat” (The Soldier’s Tale) at the Salzburger Marionettentheater in Austria. What began as intimate theatrical work, conceived at a diminished scale, has been translated into monumental form. The seated figure carries within it the memory of puppetry, of gestural language compressed and then expanded, of an artist’s hand moving through space to create presence.

“Meine Schule,” the exhibition that opens at Gagosian’s West 24th Street gallery in New York, takes its title from Baselitz’s own description of his practice. The German word, meaning “my school,” speaks to something far more personal than institutional instruction. It suggests lineage, method, philosophy passed forward through accumulated work. Conceived and designed by the artist himself alongside curator Richard Calvocoressi, the presentation reads as both retrospective gesture and continuation, a gathering of recent works that speak to concerns that animated Baselitz throughout his long career: the body in space, the dialogue between figuration and abstraction, the materials themselves as subjects demanding reverence and investigation.

The bronze carries its own narrative of transformation. Born from Baselitz’s sculptural imagination, refined through the foundry’s ancient processes, “Strawinsky” exists now as a kind of monument to artistic dialogue. It speaks across centuries to the composer whose work inspired it, across continents to the Austrian puppet theatre that hosted its conception, and backward to the hands and eyes that shaped it.

There is something profoundly moving in encountering an artist’s final considered work, knowing it was arranged for completion with intentionality and care. “Strawinsky” carries no sense of incompleteness or unfinished intention. Rather, it settles into its white patina with the gravity of something always meant to endure, a seated figure that seems to absorb light and offer it back transformed. The work stands as testament to Baselitz’s conviction that sculpture, like music, like theatre, vibrates in the space between gesture and stillness, between the fleeting moment and something that might outlast us all.

Imagery courtesy of Gagosian (@gagosian).