Baselitz Heroes

This exhibition brings together key paintings and works on paper from Georg Baselitz's breakthrough Hero series. One of the defining achievements of the artist's early career and a landmark in post-war European painting more broadly, these works established many of the visual motifs, concepts and existential themes that would go on to shape the trajectory of his practice.

Baselitz began working on the Hero paintings in the summer of 1965, aged 27, shortly after completing an artist's residency at Villa Romana in Florence. What followed was a year of intense productivity, resulting in approximately 60 paintings, 130 drawings and 38 prints, each centred on a solitary figure of epic proportions, dressed in rags or torn military uniforms. While the protagonists embody archetypal roles - the partisan, rebel, painter shepherd, poet -they are defined not by heroism but by an air of vulnerability and defeat.

They're not heroes swinging their fists, Baselitz said, 'they look broken, destroyed, ragged, tattered. And that's how I wanted them.

Rejecting both the prevailing optimism of the post-war era and the dominant artistic trends of the 1960s, Baselitz forged a singular vocabulary through which to confront the realities of post-war German society and interrogate the place of the artist within it. As a young man in East Berlin, he dismissed the idealised, chiselled figures sanctioned by Socialist Realism. And yet in West Berlin -where he returned to paint the series after his time in Florence -his work was equally conspicuous, evoking the traumatic events of the past in the midst of the city's 'economic miracle'.

At the same time, figuration was widely perceived to be in crisis: some had declared this mode of painting exhausted, while others believed it had been compromised by its association with totalitarian propaganda.

Baselitz grappled with this predicament directly, paving away through figuration's complicated history by working with and against its conventions. Together, the works read as a manifesto. While the heroes appear blocked, lost or wounded, the artist's expressive handling of paint nonetheless declared the medium capable of reinvention.

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 foundational body of work.