Horst Antes’ (b. 1936) oeuvre is a meditation on the human condition that already spans a period of over sixty years. Antes studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe under HAP Grieshaber. He later taught there and in Berlin as a professor of painting. Antes is one of the most important representatives of new figurative painting in Germany. Around 1960, he designed a pictorial figure, his so-called Kopffüßler (literally a ‘head-footer’) – a stocky-looking artistic figure with a large head, always in profile, to which the legs are directly attached – which he went on to vary, develop further and also realise in sculptural form. This artistic figure was also created as a counter-image to the forms promoted by the Nazi art dictatorship, which had only recently come to an end. This was followed by boats, shirts, windows and window frames, until Antes discovered the house as a motif for his paintings in the mid-1980s. Since then, his work has been dominated by highly simplified house shapes that look like building blocks. The date paintings appeared later. Antes was also significantly influenced by the early portraits of the Renaissance painter Piero della Francesca, which he studied while he was a fellow at the Villa Romana in Florence, but non-European art is also an important point of reference in his work. Antes took part in documenta in Kassel three times and won prizes at the Venice Biennale in 1966 and in São Paulo in 1992. In 2026 Horst Antes has an upcoming major institutional exhibition at Sprengel Museum, Hannover. His works can be found in prominent public collections in America, Asia and Europe.