Markus Lüpertz

Markus Lüpertz – Graphik Zeichnung Malerei – ShortCut @ Bode Galerie Nürnberg 2024 

In our Short-Cut exhibition with Markus Lupertz, we present one of the best-known contemporary artists. As a neo-expressionist, Lupertz had a significant influence on post-war art. His oeuvre of paintings, prints, drawings and sculptures is not only diverse – but also polarizing. The artist moves in monumental and archaic worlds of motifs that deal with centuries of human history and reveal contemporary parallels. The representational ability and emotionality of visual art that the artist strives for can be seen in the simultaneous abstraction and figuration. Abstraction allows him to concentrate his visual language and thus focus on symbols and motifs with a strongly suggestive effect. The symbolic monumentality inherent in his works goes hand in hand with a delicate style of painting and drawing that is characterized by accuracy and thus inspires in every detail.

Markus Lüpertz – Graphik Zeichnung Malerei – ShortCut @ Bode Galerie Nürnberg 2024

Markus Lupertz combines his artistic, modern way of expression with an art-historically far­ reaching pictorial tradition of Greek antiquity and mythology. The “Troy” series of works impressively demonstrates the graphic fusion of ancient subjects with artistic modernity and the topicality of worlds long gone. Lupertz integrates classical motifs and mythological figures into his works and gives them the possibility of a contemporary interpretation by deconstructing them for the viewer and making them accessible from a new perspective. In doing so, he gives them a new meaning and relevance in the context of modern society.

Markus Lüpertz – Troja XI

In the “Troy” series of works, Lupertz depicts one of the most famous turning points in mythological history, hovering between hope, beauty and an inevitable downfall. The symbol of the horse is diametrically opposed – depending on which side the narrator chooses to take. For some, it is a tricky means of victory for Greece and for others it symbolizes the unjustified downfall of the flourishing city of Troy. The myth of Troy is full of symbols of the emotional weaknesses of humankind: pride, vanity and lust.

The horse, on the other hand, stands for the necessity of rationality in worldly chaos. The two sides of the horse’s story, victory or downfall, as different and difficult to reconcile as they may be, are part of a myth – and without each other, it is impossible for the other to exist.

With the symbol of deception, Markus Lupertz succeeds in directing our gaze undisguised to the moral dilemma of truth and the timelessness of this ambivalence remains barely concealed.

Markus Lüpertz – Parsifal

The hand-colored graphic “Ulysses” is another example from Lupertz’s oeuvre of the simplicity of the archaic and the arrest and continuation of traditional subjects in his works. The title refers directly to antiquity, but the artist subtly shows an “anticlassical” realization. His depiction of Ulysses is presented with only one arm and as a torso, like an ancient sculpture that has been fragmented over the centuries. Lupertz thus references the modern philosophical guiding question of the aesthetics of the fragmentary and thus processes the fact of incompleteness not as a deficiency, but as a means of visual appeal.

Not only visually impressive, but also intellectually stimulating, the works deepen a multitude of interpretations and reflections on human nature, history and, above all, our identity.

Bode Galerie
Lorenzer Straße 2, 90402 Nuremberg, Germany
+49 911 5109200

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