Georg Baselitz at Thaddaeus Ropac Ten great things to do in London for Frieze Week 2026

By Annie Downes

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Georg Baselitz was 27 years old when, over the course of a single year, he made around 60 paintings, 130 drawings and 38 prints. At the centre of this burst of activity were his Heroes series: paintings of monumental, battered figures, barefoot and dressed in rags or torn military uniforms, stranded in ravaged landscapes.

Now, for the first time in the UK, an exhibition devoted exclusively to the series brings together key works from this formative period at Thaddaeus Ropac. Having left East Germany for West Berlin, Baselitz found himself caught between the state-sanctioned realism of the East and a West Germany swept up in the newfound optimism of the so-called German Wonder. It was the summer of 1965 that Baselitz began the Hero paintings, shortly after a residency at Villa Romana in Florence, where he had become fascinated by the distorted, or, as he called it, 'excessive,' figures of 16th-century Mannerists including Pontormo and Parmigianino. Against the backdrop of post-war Germany, his own figures emerged as partisans, rebels, painters, shepherds and poets. 'They’re not heroes swinging their fists,' Baselitz said. 'They look broken, destroyed, ragged, tattered. And that’s how I wanted them.'