Artists

Joseph Beuys

Press release

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’s monumental Bathtub (1961–87), a pivotal late work now on view in the United Kingdom for the first time. The exhibition brings together the sculpture’s key precursors, including Bathtub for a Heroine (1961–84), Mammoth Tooth, Framed (1961) and Lead Woman (1949). Presented alongside other closely related sculptures and a selection of drawings, these works illuminate the central motifs and ideas that shaped Beuys’s revolutionary concept of social sculpture – the vision that art is a vehicle of individual and collective transformation, a creative potential not contained by a single object but inseparable from life itself.