MARKUS LÜPERTZ

Less mentioned, yet equally grand is the production of Markus Lüpertz, who has been active in the fields of painting, sculpture, poetry, editing, education and piano playing for over fifty years. Lüpertz’s solution, and his first major contribution to contemporary art, was the ‘dithyramb’. Inspired by the fabled ecstatic chants of Dionysian revellers, he embarked on a series of paintings in which he worked obsessively over shapes and forms. Over the decades, Lüpertz has painted motifs culled from sources as diverse as fashion advertising, Romantic landscapes, and Cubist still lifes. If horrors are portrayed as images in the graphic compositions of other series such as ‘War and German Motifs’ (1970–1976), the artist finds a way of evoking them even in his most abstract works. He’s created bodies of work devoted to specific classical heroes, and a series of ‘Arcadias’ (2001), which pulls them together in verdant settings.

Courtesy Almine Rech