Markus LüpertzHighways and Byways

Anti-abstract

Markus Lüpertz has never believed in the purely representational character of art; rather, as he himself says, he has always seen himself „in search of the possible picture“ and has thus felt committed to no stylistic direction. Precisely for this reason he has succeeded in shaping his works freely, in his own hand, out of a great art-historical and cultural-historical fund, in creating pictures (and pictorial signs) that can be associated with him alone and that speak of a matured yet vigorous freedom which serves as a model for one or another generation of artists. Younger colleagues such as Peter Doig, Tal R and Thomas Houseago have long been among his admirers.
The exhibition and the more extensively conceived book have set themselves the task of looking behind the „grand gesture“, of following at close quarters Lüpertz’s deliberate play with the role of the artist, and of presenting his multifaceted work, as passionate as it is intellectual, in a broad selection of some 150 paintings and sculptures, among them many early works that are still surprising today. This ranges from the first works of the „dithyrambic“, „anti-abstract“ painting of the 1960s, close to Pop Art, through to the intensive engagement with the mythological and classical canon of themes in recent decades, and is impressively accompanied by an extensive section of photographic documents.
The retrospective at the Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland in Bonn stands in the continuity of the exhibitions of the most significant German artists of the present that have been presented over the past twenty years, and deliberately places Markus Lüpertz alongside Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke and Georg Baselitz.

Exhibition:
Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn, 09/10/2009 – 17/01/2010