LONDON.- Thaddaeus Ropac will present 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 institutional collections, including Tate, Landesmuseum fr Kunst, Museum Frieder Burda, Museum Kppersmhle Duisburg and Berlinische Galerie, 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.
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. There, he had been inspired by 16th-century Mannerist prints, feeling a strong affinity with the distorted – or, as he described, ‘excessive’ – figuration of artists such as Pontormo and Parmigianino. Over the course of a single year, he produced approximately 60 paintings, 130 drawings and 38 prints in quick succession, each centred on a solitary figure of epic proportions, barefoot and dressed in rags or torn military uniforms. While these protagonists assume a range of archetypal roles – partisan, rebel, painter, shepherd and poet – they are defined not by heroism but by vulnerability and defeat. Their oversized hands clutch at broken tools or paintbrushes, bleed from stigmata-like wounds, or appear trapped in the ground.
Together, the works can be read as a manifesto – albeit an ambivalent one – on painting. While within the compositions, the tools of painting appear ostensibly broken and those who wield them are blocked, stuck or immobilised, the artist’s own fluid and expressive handling of paint nonetheless declared the medium capable of reinvention.
Through the Hero paintings, Georg Baselitz made conceptual discoveries that would prove foundational for the trajectory of his oeuvre: namely that representation is in itself a construct. As art historian Uwe Fleckner observes: ‘the hero only becomes a hero by means of a venerable reception and is – like history itself – the result of a construction subject to changing purposes and political intentions.’ The artist challenged the nature of representation further in 1966, beginning his closely related series of Fraktur (Fracture) pictures in which hero figures are sliced into horizontal sections and reassembled, as demonstrated by the works Der Halbierte (The Halved) and Drei Streifen - Der Maler im Mantel (Zweites Frakturbild) [Three Stripes - The Painter in a Coat (Second Fracture Painting)] (both 1966). From 1969, he would overturn the very premise of orientation, painting the first of his career-defining inverted compositions. The Hero paintings therefore marked a pivotal juncture in the artist’s career, establishing the conceptual foundations for a practice that would become one of the most singular and uncompromising of the post-war period.
