Markus Lupertz

Having worked as an artist for more than sixty years, Markus Lüpertz has achieved the highest recognition internationally as a result of the suggestive power and archaic monumentality of his painting style. The prince among painters is today among the most outstanding artists of the present. As a young painter in the 1960s, he already stood apart from the crowd, countering the tendencies of Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art with simple figurative motifs. It was at this this time that he invented ‘dithyrambic painting’, in which figurative contents merge with one another in an expressive manner.

In addition to this intensive relationship between figuration and abstraction, German history also plays a central role in Lüpertz’s early work. Using symbolic German motifs such as, for instance, steel helmets, he found his way to a very personal iconography. Then followed phases of ‘style painting,’ which liberates itself from tangible contents, ‘mythological painting’, and landscape painting. A richly illustrated volume that spans a wide arc from the visionary beginnings to the most recent works of this unique artist, is published in conjunction with the first extensive presentation of Markus Lüpertz’s work in the United States.

The Markus Lüpertz Exhibition runs from May 27 to September 10, 2017, at the Phillips Collection, Washington, D. C., and Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D. C.