Markus Lüpertz, Männer ohne Frauen: Parsifal, 1994, Unique Piece

Markus Lüpertz

Liberec 1941

Men without Women - Parsifal, 1994

Oil paint, gouache, and colored wax crayon over woodcut

Unique work

Monogrammed lower right

Sheet size: approx. 88 x 60.2 cm

Markus Lüpertz came to West Germany with his family at the age of seven. from 1956 to 1963, he studied at the Werkkunstschule Krefeld under Laurens Goosens and at the Düsseldorf Art Academy. In 1962, Lüpertz moved to West Berlin, where he founded the self-help gallery "Großgörschen 35" together with Bernd Koberling and Karl Horst Hödicke. Contrary to all contemporary tendencies toward abstraction, Lüpertz began painting pictures with simple representational content. In a 1966 manifesto, he described his emphatically expressive paintings as "dithyrambic painting," after an ancient Greek cult song to the god of fertility, Dionysus. Between 1969 and 1977, he created his "German Motifs," still-life-like compositions that present symbolic objects from the past, such as steel helmets, shovels, or flags, in monstrous proportions, thus challenging a confrontation with German history. In 1970, Lüpertz received the Villa Romana Prize and spent a year in Florence. In 1976, he accepted a professorship at the Karlsruhe Academy. from 1977 onward, Lüpertz addressed abstract tendencies of the 1950s in his "style paintings." That same year, the Hamburger Kunsthalle showed a first overview of his work, followed by the Kunsthalle Bern and the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven. In the early 1980s, Lüpertz's increasing abstraction was abandoned in favor of a new representational and spatial approach, incorporating art-historical quotations and set pieces. In addition to employing all printmaking techniques, Lüpertz also worked as a poet and, since 1980, as a stage designer and sculptor. In 1982, he participated in documenta VII in Kassel. In 1986, Markus Lüpertz was appointed to the Düsseldorf Art Academy, which he headed as rector from 1988. In 1990, Lüpertz received the Lovis Corinth Prize from the Esslingen Artists' Guild. Major solo exhibitions have been devoted to his work, including a thematic retrospective at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf in 1996 and a retrospective at the Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung in Munich in 1997, which was subsequently shown in Wuppertal and Barmen. In 1997/98 his works were represented in the exhibition "Images of Germany: Art from a Divided Country" at the Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin.