Tracey Emin on Georg Baselitz’s Visionary Heroes
The artist reflects on meeting Baselitz and his profound legacy as a landmark exhibition of his breakthrough early work opens in London.
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There exists a particular kind of artistic prescience, one that arrives before the world is quite ready to receive it. Georg Baselitz possessed this quality in abundance, a painter whose vision seemed to operate on a frequency all its own, challenging conventions at precisely the moment when convention most needed challenging. It is this quality, this sense of being perpetually ahead of one’s epoch, that Tracey Emin articulates when speaking of meeting him and contemplating his enduring influence.
The new exhibition at Thaddaeus Ropac in London focuses on Baselitz’s ‘Heroes’ series, produced between 1965 and 1966, a body of work that marks a pivotal turning point in his artistic trajectory. These paintings, rendered in a gestural expressionist language and often depicting heroic or monumental forms, emerged during a period of profound cultural ferment in post war Europe. What distinguishes them is not rebellion for its own sake, but rather an intuitive sense of artistic necessity, a pull toward expressive authenticity that the art establishment would only later come to understand as visionary.
Emin’s reflection speaks to something essential about how we misinterpret artistic innovation. To contemporaries, the artist working at the frontier can appear transgressive, even wilful. Yet time has a way of revealing that what seemed like defiance was merely fidelity to a deeper artistic truth. The so called rebel is simply moving at the pace demanded by genuine creative vision, leaving history to catch up at its own deliberate speed.
Baselitz’s ‘Heroes’ series represents precisely this kind of watershed moment in post war European painting. These works carry the intensity and formal daring that would come to define his mature practice, rendered with a physicality and urgency that speaks to the charged cultural moment of their creation. The paintings embody a commitment to gestural abstraction and expressive figuration at a moment when such approaches were still finding their language and their justification.
What makes this exhibition particularly significant is its opportunity to view these seminal works as a concentrated body, allowing their thematic and formal preoccupations to resonate across time. In doing so, visitors encounter not merely historical artifacts, but paintings that continue to pulse with the creative energy that animated their making. The exhibition remains on view until 18 December 2026.
Imagery courtesy of Thaddaeus Ropac (@thaddaeusropac).