The Galerie Michael Haas is showing 50 paintings and sculptures by Markus Lüpertz from five decades.
The exhibited works offer a cross-section of the entire multi-layered oeuvre of the 75-year-old painting star, who also works in sculpture, drawing, graphic art, poetry and music. Lüpertz made a genuine contribution to art history starting in the 1960s with his expressive “dithyrambic painting”, named after the ancient Greek cult song to the god Dionysus, along with his monumental still-lifes, “German motifs”, in the 1970s. Besides numerous works from these early phases of his work the exhibition ranges from the abstract “style paintings” of the 1970s referencing art history, to the paintings from the Parsifal series from the 1990s, and finally to his paintings and sculptures contending with the legacy of antiquity, which has intensively occupied him from 1985 to today.
The presentation of monumental paintings and his color-composed bronzes provides an extensive overview of the canon of forms and motifs that Lüpertz has developed over decades, usually in groups of works, and that are the unmistakable sign of his oeuvre.