LONDON.- Thaddaeus Ropac London will present Bathtub for a Heroine,the first exhibition to bring to focus the decades-long evolution of Joseph Beuys’ 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.

Wherever alienation has settled between people – one could almost call it a sculpture of coldness – there the warmth-sculpture must enter. It is there that interpersonal warmth has to be generated. That is love. — Joseph Beuys

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.

What the future needs is the creation of the ‘social warmth sculpture’. — Joseph Beuys

Beuys coined the term ‘evolutionary warmth’ – often interchanged with ‘revolutionary warmth’ – to describe a principle that lies at the heart of his practice. Beyond being a poetic metaphor, the notion of evolutionary warmth functions as a material philosophy. By activating circulation, exchange and imagination, warmth counteracts rigid systems and renders them malleable. For Beuys, warmth became the most fundamental medium of sculpture – an energetic, thermic force that enables transformation in matter, thought and social processes alike. It is the very motor of sculptural processes towards ‘possible future forms,’ as he once said: ‘I consider temperature to be the most important aspect of sculpture.’

My sculpture is not fixed and finished. Processes continue in most of them: chemical reactions, fermentations, colour changes, decay, drying up. Everything is in a state of change. — Joseph Beuys

The bathtubs explore warmth as a sculptural material – an inherently paradoxical pursuit given its formless nature. The first, 28cm-long bronze iteration, Mammoth Tooth, Framed (1961), would later be recast to form part of the ensemble Bathtub for a Heroine (1984). Here, it is combined with an electric immersion heater, whose cables protrude outwards into space as though to evoke the necessity of connection, as well as a vertical element – part figure, part chimney – representing the heroine. In this dense sculptural constellation, the mammoth tooth becomes the sculptural core, anchoring the work in deep evolutionary time, while the heroine embodies transformative human agency.

Beuys later reimagined the bathtub on a monumental scale – ten times larger – replacing the visible immersion heater with an internal heating circuit concealed within the tub’s double walls. Designed to be connected to a conventional household heating system, he even played with the idea of patenting the object. The heroine-chimney figure is omitted, the bathtub instead acquires a double capacity: it could heat both the water it contained and the surrounding space, suggesting use in domestic or communal settings. Its imposing, almost mammoth-like physicality lends the bathtub an anthropomorphic quality, while its functionality seems to expand beyond pure utility: here, warmth has the potential to generate communication and connectivity.

My intention was not to create or depict symbols, but to express the powers that exist in the world: the real powers,’ he said. ‘The old way of doing this was through mythology. The new way is more through the understanding of art and science: what I call exact science — the result of direct observation.

The bathtubs are hybrid objects that merge multiple temporal layers, combining prehistoric relic with modern everyday object. In this context, Beuys often spoke of ‘organic machines.’ The early sculpture Bed (1950), also on view in the exhibition, is another work that stages the tension between mechanical pressure and organic form. In it, a female torso closely resembling the heroine is suspended in a mechanical screw clamp. Rather than being simply trapped between two pressure blocks, she becomes situated within a field of energetic polarity. Beuys himself emphasised that the work is not about suffering per se, but about levitation and spatial force. The levitating effect – an anti-gravitational pull, a rise despite pressure – suggests a kind of energetic thrust. Likewise, the female figure is anything but passive: she becomes a conductive medium that not only resists the opposing forces but absorbs and reconciles them.

A selection of drawings further develops the motif of the heroine and her connection to the principle of evolutionary warmth. The female figure appears throughout Beuys’ entire oeuvre, and his drawings in particular. For Beuys, women embody the capacity for intuitive action, change and transformation, as well as the ability to cross thresholds and inhabit marginal space. He treats paper as a sculptural space – in which the margin becomes a literal threshold – and, whether depicted as Female Diver, Little Fool, Animal Woman, Mother, Girl or Amazone, his female figures are adventurous, playful and combative. Moreover, he equips them with a distinct spatial agency. They actively traverse realms – whether temporal, geological, social or material – while their gestures convey an energetic sensibility of motion and suspension, rather than any narrative representation. ‘The heroic position in my works is generally the female one,’ he once explained: ‘the cold, hard, crystallised, burnt-out old clinker that I would call the male intellect, [is] the cause of much of our suffering […] Taken to extremes, this means man has his head buried in the ground, while woman gazes at the spheres.’