In art-historical terms, Horst Antes takes up an important position with his figures of cephalopods, running counter to the general dominant trend of abstraction in post-war Germany and standing for a switch towards the movement of ‘New Figuration’. As a result of the dialogue with his teacher Grieshaber and the CoBrA group artists, Antes arrived at the mode in which his cephalopods play a prominent role: areas of color that are clearly separated from each other define the picture space and the central figures, which are reduced to the head (the centre of sensory perception), the legs (means of locomotion) and the organs of generation. So it is the human being as a complex of functions and not the human being as trunk and body that seems to be the key feature for Antes at this stage in his work. So Figur für HAP Grieshaber is a tribute to his teacher that is full of symbols, as in the raised hands, adopted as an expressive formula from gestures of worship in old master paintings, or the ‘portraiting’ of Grieshaber with the aid of secondary characteristics like the moustache.