Silent Power

Georg Baselitz, Markus Lüpertz, Jörg Immendorff and A.R. Penck are recognized as the great twentieth century legacy of German painting and art. Each artist has aggressively pursued his own individual ideas and means, as the first generation of post-war artists, working from the complexities of German history to reveal a deeply personal experience of culture and the world. Aside from their stylistic differences, each also has an individual set of philosophical, political and social issues expressed through their respective practice and production, which reflects a new interpretation of the artists’ condition and a fresh diginity unifying post-war art. By the 1970’s and 80’s, these artists gained international recognition and their influence spread far beyond Germany, with their works exhibited and collected by major international museums, galleries and collectors. Furthermore, these artists have had a profound influence on new generations of international artists. The rise and influence of the Leipzig school of artists in Germany over the past five years has further solidified the importance of Baselitz, Lüpertz, Immendorff and Penck as the historical forefathers of younger generations of German artists. In the early years of the 21st Century, Baselitz, Lüpertz, Immendorff and Penck continue to prove their international relevance and historical importance.

The first stop of an Asian Tour which focuces on important thematic and ideological dialogues, the exhibition, which showcases the works of Baselitz, Lüpertz, Immendorff and Penck will reveal the formal and conceptual similarities and differences between these artists as a testament to their individual methods and universal themes.

Artist biographies:

Georg Baselitz (real name, Kern) was born in 1938 at Deutschbaselitz in Saxony. He studied at the Academy in West Berlin, and it was during that period that he and Eugen Schönebeck published the first Pandämonium—a wild, aggressive text inspired by Antonin Artaud’s poetic attitude. The focus of Baselitz’s art in the mid-sixties is the “new type”. This term can be related to both the idea of the regeneration of man—a nod to expressionism and post-war coming of age —and to the construction of the new man or Hero. From this concept, Baselitz developed a style of painting whose sensory appeal was the result of his aversion for the illustrated image; the hero and figurative motif remained intact in spite of his manipulations and distortions of the pictorial subject matter. In the late 60s, Baselitz began to fracture the images ultimately creating the first inverted images in 1969. He fractured the pictorial surface, challenging current standards about the importance of imagery and how it is interpreted. These inversions and manipulations, which have continued throughout his oeuvre, allow the viewer to focus more closely on the painterly process rather than on the subject matter, showing how Baselitz simultaneously works against the motif, and any identification between form and content.

Markus Lüpertz was born in 1941 in Bohemia, but spent his childhood and teenage years in Rhineland. He was a student at the Werkkunstschule in Krefeld and the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf. With a personal interest in history, including art and music, Lupertz’s work from the Sixties focused on a modern, sparse pictorial interpretation of the dithyramb, an ecstatic chorus from the cult of Dionysus which incorporated themes of renewal and regeneration. His “Deutsche Motif” paintings from the Seventies, depicting historical war iconography, including soldier’s helmets, bunkers, and shovels, which were controversial and challenging, were at the vanguard of his generation. Beginning in the Eighties, his focus shifted to monumental figures and abstracted landscapes, including references to the 17th century French classicist painters Corot and Poussin, Greek sculpture and mythology, emphasizing the historical importance of the genre of painting and it’s context within a greater cultural language and aesthetic. Not only is he a prolific artist, but as rector of the Kunstakademie in Dusseldorf he is continually engaged with the newest generation of artists, and the academic and historical traditions.

Jörg Immendorff (born in 1945). The iconographic language that Immendorff has cultivated throughout his career began while he was a student of Joseph Beuys in the Sixties. Immendorff responded to the chaos and social crises of a split Germany with a politically charged body of work, his first, called “LIDL”. He correlated this nonsensical word to the sound of a baby’s rattle, using it to ridicule the precious aesthetic object and elitist art traditions. In the “Café Deutschland” and “Café de Flore” series of the 1970s and 1980s, he invented a fictional territory populated by artists, intellectuals and politicians, and included German symbols such as eagles, flags, and emblems of East and West. In this imaginary locale, he could explore his thoughts on politics, his country, art and the world in general. “The Rake’s Progress” series of the 1990s, inspired by William Hogarth’s 18th century etchings parodying a Christian morality play, is peopled by significant figures in his career portraying characters in the play. His later works, from 1999 to the present, while forsaking the more overt imagery of his past for a cleaner, simplified canvas, still retain a common bold thread intrinsic to his oeuvre and create a more personal, introspective vision of the world he continues to create in his canvases.

Ralf Winkler, alias A.R. Penck, was born in 1939 in Dresden and lived in East Germany until 1980. He was unable to escape unnoticed to the West before then, due to his early success and prominence in cultural circles in both East and West Germany. Adopting several pseudonyms, including “TM”, not only allowed him to travel to exhibitions in the West undetected by authorities but also created the conceptual framework for his paintings, providing access to and communication with his viewers clandestinely. He became acquainted with the theoretical arsenal of various disciplines (philosophy, logic, literature, techniques), testing different systems, languages and models in his paintings and challenging contemporary communication and information systems. Penck’s paintings draw from a carefully elaborated theory and strictly defined repertoire of figures and symbols, creating a unique pictorial language. This model of communication and action epitomizes the foundation of his oeuvre which continues to influence an entire generation of artists.