Heinz Schanz, one of the formative artists for southwest German painting in the postwar period is considered a co-founder of the Karlsruhe "New Figuration" at a time when non-objective painting was dominant on an international level. In the circle of Grieshaber's Karlsruhe students Horst Antes, Walter Stöhrer, Dieter Krieg and Hans Baschang, the somewhat older Heinz Schanz played an important role for his colleagues. Schanz himself was influenced less by the woodcutter than by the gouache painter HAP Grieshaber, who used dull paint to put his designs on paper and had his students paint over the paintings as a rite of passage. Schanz literally hurled his tempera colors onto the painting base, hard, expressive, powerful, wild, playful, gestural, but not informal. In contrast to Lothar Quinte, who initially worked in a similar way, Schanz always stuck to the figurative. In the untitled egg tempera painting from 1962, the gray and black brushstrokes and strokes, obviously placed quickly on the cardboard, form themselves into rough outlines of a grimacing head.