Nach Dürer, 2001

After studying at the School of Arts and Crafts in Krefeld and the Arts Academy of Düsseldorf, his annoyance at being expelled from the academy motivated the young painter Maler Markus Lüpertz to finally move to Berlin in 1962. There he soon became a major personality in the local art scene and with other fellow artists of his generation, he established the self-help gallery Großgörschen 35 in 1964, in which the young artists regularly hosted exhibitions and festivals. In the same year, Lüpertz held his first solo exhibition entitled Dithyrambic Painting. The subjects of these early works were the nonsensical, the poetic and the exaggerated, which were torn from the conventional context. Lüpertz has repeatedly focused his attention on the incomprehensible in his painting, always moving between abstraction and objectivity. This approach runs like a thread through the artist’s varied œuvre. His painting is a reflection of its own means: regressing to art history in the form of arguments with various currents or very specific models but also everyday subjects from the immediate present are characteristic of his painting.

As such, Lüpertz dealt with German history in his early work and used the symbolic motifs of uniforms, flags and steel helmets to address Germany’s national pathos. In the early 1990s, he created the Parsifal series, which places stencil-like male faces in front of varied backgrounds and shows the great variety in Lüpertz’ painting. At the end of the 1990s, he also turned to landscape painting, putting together painted collages in a picture-in-picture process with abstract lattice structures and other objects in the pictorial space, as they drifted away from each other at the same time. The Reinhard Ernst collection also includes a work from this series, entitled Nach Dürer (after Dürer).

Markus Lüpertz is an independent artist in contemporary painting in the Wiesbaden collection. Often dubbed the “painter prince”, the artist had no qualms about withdrawing his works from the Documenta 6 exhibition in 1977, as he did not agree with the German Pavilion presentation. Despite this, he took part in the subsequent Documenta 7 and the São Paulo Biennale in 1983. He also returned to the Arts Academy of Düsseldorf as a professor in 1986, where he was the rector from 1988 to 2009. Markus Lüpertz lives and works in Berlin, Düsseldorf and Karlsruhe.