Joseph Beuys Bathtub for a Heroine

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

Thaddaeus Ropac London is pleased to present Bathtub for a Heroine, the first exhibition to bring to focus the decades-long evolution of Joseph Beuys’ bathtub, one of the artist's major late sculptural motifs. Centred around the rarely shown monumental Bathtub (1961–87), on view in the UK for the first time, the exhibition brings together its key precursors, including the sculptural ensemble Bathtub for a Heroine (1961–84), Mammoth Tooth, Framed (1961) and Lead Woman (1949). Presented together with a selection of drawings, these works illuminate the ideas that shaped Beuys’ concept of social sculpture – the conviction that art is a vehicle of individual and collective transformation, an energetic force not contained by a single object, but inseparable from life itself.

Beuys occupies a unique position in post-war artistic discourse, redefining material and sculpture in ways that dissolved the boundaries between art, science, social theory and politics. Growing up in a devastated post-war Germany, 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. At the heart of his practice was the principle of ‘evolutionary warmth’, his term for the energetic, thermic forces that enable transformation in material, as well as thought and societal processes. In order to move forward, Beuys argued, we must return ‘to the beginning of the evolution of everything and everybody.’ 

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 

Often conceived as functional objects – theoretically capable of heating water and the room they are installed in – the bathtubs explore the possibilities of warmth as sculptural material. Like the other mediums Beuys frequently used, such as felt, fat and honey, they contend with the paradox of giving heat and energy tangible form, while also carrying remedial, therapeutic qualities. ‘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.’

Shown alongside a selection of drawings, many seen in London for the first time, that are laden with maternal and natal imagery, these sculptures resonate as vessels of memory as well as renewal. They offer a counterforce to what Beuys regarded as the dominant, sterile and over-intellectualised masculinity of modern culture. Across their various configurations, modern and primordial forms converge, including a mammoth’s tooth, a carved female nude, a traditional oven and an electrical immersion heater. They come to represent birth, and ‘the wound or trauma experienced by every person as they came into contact with the hard material conditions of the world’, as Beuys once said. 

The exhibition reveals the ongoing relevance of Beuys’ thermodynamic principle, inviting us to consider how art and society – like thermic energy – undergo processes of continual transformation.