Opening four months after his death, the retrospective at Sehwa Museum of Art follows six decades of fractured, inverted painting to a gilded closeVisitors expecting Georg Baselitz's famous upside-down figures at his first Korean museum retrospective are greeted instead by a picture of cattle, hung front and center right upon entering the galleries.In it, two cows stand in a green pasture. A clean horizontal cut runs through the canvas, and the halves sit out of register, so that muzzles and shoulders no longer align. The picture hangs right side up, yet it manages to unsettle all the same. "Two Cows Divided I" (Jochen Littkemann/Georg Baselitz) "Two Cows Divided I" (1966), the oldest work in the show, belongs to the Fracture Paintings, a mid-1960s series begun three years before he inverted his first picture. Across the series, the late German painter divided his canvases into bands and severed the figures on them. The political charge here is unmistakable: pastoral scenery was hardly innocent in a country where the Nazis had turned idyllic landscapes and farm animals into propaganda.For Koreans, the bovine might call to mind the works of Lee Jung-seob, who painted the animal again and again as an emblem, so the common reading goes, of a nation persevering through colonial rule and war. The sharper parallel, though, may be the cut itself. The dissonance of an idyll torn in half by force needs little gloss in Korea, any more than it did in postwar Germany.Politics is only one register in the career of a modern master that ran through many. By turns provocateur, chronicler of national trauma and restless stylist, Baselitz worked across painting, sculpture and printmaking for 60 years to become one of postwar Europe's most sought-after artists. The retrospective, which opened Thursday at the Sehwa Museum of Art, is his first museum showing in Korea in nearly 20 years and the first in the country since his death on April 30 at 88. It gathers 46 paintings, drawings and sculptures, 39 of them new to Korea. View of "Georg Baselitz" at Sehwa Museum of Art in Seoul (Hong Chul-ki/Sehwa Museum of Art) That the exhibition doubles as a memorial is entirely an accident of timing. The museum prepared the show for more than a year in consultation with the artist, and its curators traveled to his studio in early April to film what became his final interview."We thought we were presenting his world while he was still alive," said Ahn Mi-hee, director of the museum. "He passed away three weeks after we returned. That made this a posthumous show, and we felt that weight the whole way through."The galleries are arranged by theme rather than chronology, and the inverted paintings, his best-known work, appear early. From 1969 on, Baselitz painted his subjects upside down from the start rather than rotating a finished picture, often with the canvas laid flat on the floor. The device, he insisted, drew the eye to paint and surface instead of subject. The opening floor ends with eight portraits of Elke Kretzschmar, his wife and muse since 1962 and his most constant subject. The portraits drift between figuration and abstraction, her likeness barely legible in the paint. View of "Georg Baselitz" at Sehwa Museum of Art in Seoul (Hong Chul-ki/Sehwa Museum of Art) Much of the floor above belongs to the Remix series, in which Baselitz revisited his earlier paintings with looser lines and brighter color. The battered soldiers of his 1965 Hero series return most often, joined by motifs from painters he admired, Duchamp, Munch and de Kooning among them."He called remixing a process of invention, a way of making something that had never existed before," said Sunwoo Ji-eun, who heads the museum's exhibition planning team. "It can look random, but he was steering the whole time, the way a producer mixes tracks. Decades cross the surface of a single canvas."One might write off these works as an exercise in self-quotation, but the artist's edge shines through nonetheless. In two of the Hero remixes, a moustached figure's resemblance to Adolf Hitler remains difficult to unsee six decades on. The same kind of instinct governs the eagle paintings in the next galleries, where Germany's national emblem plunges or hangs head-down, as in "Loafers Were Found Later" (2023). "The Leap (Remix)" (Jochen Littkemann/Georg Baselitz) The near-total absence of the 1980s and '90s, the Neo-Expressionist decades that made Baselitz an international name, leaves the survey wanting as a full retrospective, though to be fair a museum of this size can only borrow so much. The shortfall is felt more keenly in the Remix rooms, where the reworkings appear without the earlier paintings they revisit. Viewers get the reply but not the call, and are left to take the invention on faith.The final galleries are the show's most affecting. Under dimmed lights, along a curved and carpeted wall, hang the Gold Paintings, the series that occupied Baselitz's last years. Late drawings of familiar motifs — the eagles, the hands and feet — fill the surrounding walls in the rooms leading up to them. View of "Georg Baselitz" at Sehwa Museum of Art in Seoul (Hong Chul-ki/Sehwa Museum of Art) It is hard to imagine a more unsparing meditation on mortality. Those who followed Baselitz's late exhibitions watched the figures in his paintings grow thinner by the year; here they arrive at their sparest, their silhouettes reduced to bare contour. The line is closer to ink than to oil, thin and wavering, the impasto of his earlier decades nowhere to be found. Against a gold backdrop that somehow feels more somber than splendid, the forms cast no shadow and seem to carry no weight.The artist's studio, according to the director, had asked the museum not to stage the room as a memorial, and the presentation is duly restrained. The reckoning comes from the paintings, all the more ferocious in their faintness. "More Than That" (2026) is the room's centerpiece: a composite figure of the artist and Elke dangles head-down against a ground of gold leaf, beneath a knife-swipe of blue and yellow. One can only assume that Baselitz meant to seal the two of them in gold for eternity, ahead of the end he knew was near. View of "Georg Baselitz" at Sehwa Museum of Art in Seoul (Hong Chul-ki/Sehwa Museum of Art) In the interview that plays just outside the galleries, filmed weeks before his death, Baselitz has the final say. Black, he says, is the beginning of an aesthetic intention, and gold is the end of that process.The man who spent 60 years unsettling the picture has finally let it rest."Georg Baselitz" runs through Dec. 27 at Sehwa Museum of Art in central Seoul.