Markus Lüpertz: Avantgarde der Kontinuität

Following the recent retrospectives at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris, the Times Art Museum in Peking and the Museum Küppersmühle für Moderne Kunst in Duisburg, the China Art Museum in Shanghai is currently devoting a retrospective show to the artist Markus Lüpertz.
Next year the Phillips Collection and the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington will each present an extensive survey of the artist’s past work.

Markus Lüpertz’s monumental sculpture Daphne has been prominently displayed for over a year outside the Antikenmuseum Basel, where it has attracted a great deal of attention. That presence will now be extended by means of a group of sculptures and drawings. As from 12 November, works by Markus Lüpertz that interrelate with the collection will be exhibited inside the museum. The exhibition will centre around a terracotta statuette (Taranto, ca. 400 B.C.) from the museum’s collection that inspired Lüpertz to create a number of works on paper and a series of reworked plaster figures. This will be the first showing of the works concerned, which were specifically created for the museum.

In addition to the dialogue in the Antikenmuseum Basel, the Galerie Knoell will expand on the theme through a representative group of newly created paintings, sculptures and drawings by Markus Lüpertz. That exhibition will be held in the gallery’s premises at Luftgässlein 4, opposite the museum.

Markus Lüpertz, who is one of Germany’s best known contemporary artists and one of Europe’s leading painters and sculptors, has created drawings and bronze sculptures for the museum that display a vehement, archaic monumentality. His works derive from an artistic and intellectual preoccupation with the forms and literature of antiquity and mythology.

His references to antiquity, as regards both content and form, have often been seen as an anachronistic step backwards, but that is a misconception on which Markus Lüpertz plays and which he uses to provoke the viewer. The titles of his works and his classical motifs can convey the impression that his images belong or can even be interpreted in the classical canon. Yet the abstract dissolution of his forms reflects the powerful presence of a style of painting that demands its viewers to respond to it without preconceived notions and that requires the penetrating, undisguised presence of its figures.