The artist Georg Baselitz died in April 2026. Born in 1938 in Deutschbaselitz, he grew up in a country left wrecked and shamed by its Nazi wars. His work grappled with cultural guilt. “All German painters have neuroses when it comes to Germany’s past,” he told Der Spiegel in 2013. “If you want, my paintings are my battles.” Focusing on inverted and often grotesque figures, his paintings challenged viewers and their equanimity. Two series of paintings in a new exhibition at Thaddeus Ropac, with whom Baselitz had a close relationship, celebrate the work of his last 10 years. The paintings are inhabited by skulls and shadows, an unflinching expression of his obsession with mortality. —Maggie Turner