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Indepth Arts News:
"New Paintings by Jörg Immendorff"
2005-03-02 until 2005-04-02
Michael Werner Gallery
New York, NY,
USA United States of America
Michael Werner Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by the pre-eminent German artist, Jörg Immendorff (b. 1945). This exhibition, which immediately follows a new series of sculptures the gallery presented in February, continues to highlight Immendorff’s impressive and broad-ranging new works, emphasizing his importance at the forefront of contemporary art. Incorporating disparate iconographies including anthropomorphic images, human and animal figures, and Classical subjects, these new paintings are part of a continuum of Immendorff’s remarkable artistic vision.
The iconographic language that Immendorff has cultivated throughout his career began while he was a student of Jospeh 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.
Immendorff has been exhibited throughout Europe, Asia and the United States, and his work has been the subject of major one-person exhibitions including Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Municipal Museum, The Hague; Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City; Kuntsmuseum, Bonn; Moore College of Art and Design, Philadelphia; Arts Club of Chicago. He received the Order of Merit from the Federal Republic of Germany in 1998.
IMAGE
Jorg Immendorff
untitled , 2003
oil paint on canvas
78 3/4 x 59 1/8 "
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