Jorg Immendorff

This expert survey of Jörg Immendorff’s career reassesses an artist whose period of notoriety in America lasted a relatively short time in the 1980’s. This was partly a matter of mistaken identity – he was too closely linked with the neo-expressionist and new image (?) bandwagon prevalent at the time. His connection to direct contemporaries who gained mega-celebrity status, Anselm Keifer and Gerhardt Richter, is also shown to be partly incidental…

In later paintings Jörg Immendorff turns his concerns to the politics of the art world, drawing reference from and adding to a critical lexicon of art history. In Door to the Sun, his theatre is seen from backstage. The haloed silhouette of his mentor Beuys, dominating the arena, is rendered as a Wizard of Oz construction: not a man, but a museum, being slowly uncrated into the form of Jörg Immendorff. His ice forms, which previously symbolised the freezing decay of a nation, now embody the tools of painting…

Works in Kunstmuseum Bonn

Immendorff’s recent portfolio of etchings The Rake’s Progress takes Hogarth’s original and updates it with appropriately satirical images from Beuys in an airplane to the artist himself…

Adler