Thaddaeus Ropac's London gallery at Ely House, 37 Dover Street, is bringing together Georg Baselitz's early Hero paintings for the first time in the British capital. Georg Baselitz: The Heroes 1965–66 opens on 13 October 2026 and runs to 18 December, with admission free and the gallery open Tuesday to Saturday. The series dates from a decisive moment. In 1965, the then 27-year-old Baselitz began painting battered, barefoot figures in torn uniforms, stranded in scorched, empty landscapes. Presented as partisans, rebels, painters and shepherds, the men are pointedly unheroic — wounded, isolated and exposed rather than triumphant. Baselitz conceived the cycle as a provocation aimed at the complacency of West Germany's post-war economic miracle and its eagerness to forget the recent past. The London hang draws loans from major public collections, including Tate, the Berlinische Galerie, Museum Frieder Burda and the Museum Kücpersmühle in Duisburg. The Hero pictures are seldom seen as a group, and gathering the surviving works from the mid-1960s cycle in a single room allows their scale and bruised physicality to register in a way that individual loans cannot. The gap between the figures' grand titles and their abject condition is the engine of the whole series. Baselitz, born in 1938 in Saxony, is one of the defining painters of post-war German art, part of the generation that rebuilt the country's painting after 1945. Within a few years of the Hero cycle he would begin the inverted, upside-down compositions that became his signature, and he later represented Germany at the Venice Biennale. The gallery is a frequent stage for his work — Ropac's new Seoul space is concurrently showing a Baselitz exhibition — and the London presentation gives UK audiences a rare chance to see the raw, confrontational beginnings of that career up close.