Thaddaeus Ropac has opened 'The Heroes 1965–66' at its Ely House space in London, an exhibition gathering key works from Georg Baselitz's breakthrough series of his formative years — widely regarded as one of the defining achievements of his early career and a landmark in post-war European painting. The show runs from 13 October to 18 December 2026. Begun in 1965, when Baselitz was 27, the Hero paintings depict battered, barefoot men in torn uniforms stranded in burnt-out landscapes. Cast as partisans, rebels, painters and shepherds, the figures are defeated rather than heroic: a deliberate challenge to West Germany's post-war boom and its eagerness to forget the past. Monumental single figures on dark grounds seem to push forward out of the canvas, surrounding the viewer on all sides. The exhibition brings the series together in London for the first time, with loans from the Tate, the Berlinische Galerie, the Museum Frieder Burda and the Museum Küppersmühle in Duisburg. It is accompanied by a publication, and the Financial Times' Jackie Wullschlager has praised the show's monumental single figures for amplifying the paradox of each one: Baselitz's painterly aggression in depicting failure and collapse. The opening, on 13 October, coincided with the start of Frieze Week, placing the post-war master's landmark series at the centre of London's busiest art week. It also lands in a season when Baselitz's late work is under renewed scrutiny: the exhibition follows the artist's recent museum presentations and arrives as the first major London statement of the Hero paintings as a group — the pictures that, in the mid-1960s, turned the conventions of heroic history painting inside out. For viewers encountering the series together, the effect is cumulative. The figures repeat and vary — square-shouldered, exhausted, flag-bearing — across canvases that refuse both celebration and consolation, and the exhibition's London gathering makes the case for these works as the foundation on which everything in Baselitz's subsequent practice was built.