Joseph Beuys: Bathtub for a Heroine

13 January – 21 March 2026

Thaddaeus Ropac London presents Bathtub for a Heroine,the first exhibition to bring to focus the decades-long evolution of Joseph Beuys’s monumental Bathtub (1961–87), a pivotal late work now on view in the United Kingdom for the first time. The exhibition brings together the sculpture’s key precursors, including Bathtub for a Heroine (1961–84), Mammoth Tooth, Framed (1961) and Lead Woman (1949). Presented alongside other closely related sculptures and a selection of drawings, these works illuminate the central motifs and ideas that shaped Beuys’s revolutionary concept of social sculpture – the vision that art is a vehicle of individual and collective transformation, a creative potential not contained by a single object but inseparable from life itself.

Emerging as an artist in post-war Germany, Beuys occupies a unique position among the conceptual and participatory art movements of that era. With the proposition that an artwork’s material could be an active agent, rather than merely an aesthetic surface, and by exploring immaterial forces such as heat, energy and imagination, Beuys profoundly expanded the idea of what sculpture can be – dissolving the boundaries between art, science, social theory and politics. Marked by the experience of war and in response to a post-war society of repression, he attributed an essential function to art in the renewal of society: capable of healing collective wounds, unleashing creative potential and catalysing real political change.

Free

Tuesday—Saturday, 10am—6pm