Georg Baselitz: The Heroes 1965–66

Thaddaeus Ropac presents an exhibition dedicated to Georg Baselitz’s Hero paintings, bringing together key works from this breakthrough series of the artist’s formative years. Widely regarded as one of the defining achievements of his early career and a landmark in post-war European painting more broadly, the series established many of the visual motifs, concepts and existential themes that would go on to shape the trajectory of the artist’s practice. With loans from major collections, including Tate, Berlinische Galerie, Museum Frieder Burda and Museum Küppersmühle Duisburg, as well as the artist’s family holdings and private collections, The Heroes is the first exhibition in the UK devoted exclusively to this body of work.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue featuring an essay by Max Hollein, Director and CEO of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, originally written on the occasion of Georg Baselitz – The Heroes at the Städel Museum, Frankfurt, in 2016, the first comprehensive museum presentation dedicated to the series, which later travelled to Stockholm, Rome and Bilbao.

Created during a period of intense productivity between 1965 and 1966, when Georg Baselitz was just 27 years old, the Hero paintings marked a turning point in the artist’s practice. Rejecting both the prevailing optimism of the post-war era and the dominant artistic currents of the 1960s, he forged a singular figurative vocabulary through which to confront the realities of post-war German society and interrogate the place of the artist within it. The central motif of this series is a cast of monumental, ambiguous figures set within ravaged landscapes. They sit or stand aimlessly in no man’s land, displaced between past and present. ‘They’re not heroes swinging their fists,’ he stated, ‘they look broken, destroyed, ragged, tattered. And that’s how I wanted them.’

Georg Baselitz began working on the Hero paintings in the summer of 1965, shortly after completing an artist’s residency at Villa Romana in Florence.

Free

Tuesday—Saturday, 10am—6pm