Markus Lüpertz was born in 1941 in Liberec in Bohemia, in a German-speaking region which was annexed to Nazi Germany during World War Two. He studied at the Krefeld Kunstgewerbeschule (School of Applied Arts) with Laurens Goosens – spending a semester at the Kunstakademie (Fine Arts Academy) Düsseldorf.
In 1962, he settled in West Berlin, where he joined the Großgörschen 35 Gallery shortly after the departure of its esteemed members Bernd Koberling and Karl Horst Hödicke. There, he developed his art, his network – mingling with the likes of Jörg Immendorff, Georg Baselitz and Gerhard Schröder (who later went on to become Chancellor) – and earned his reputation. As the years went by, Lüpertz became known as ‘the prince of painters’ owing to his highly theatrical and spectacular public appearances, his egocentric rhetoric and his extravagant lifestyle.
Artistically, Lüpertz placed himself in purposeful opposition to the main trends of this time, skirting the cold factuality of minimal and conceptual pictorial pieces to embrace neo-expressionism fully. This implied an adoption of figuration and simple and essential motifs, all utilised in an expressive manner. His early Berlin style, described as ‘dithyrambic paintings’ and exhibited in his gallery in 1964, is often identified as the starting point of an aesthetic he would eventually champion and lead.
Between 1969 and 1977, the artist explored larger formats in a series that included symbols, motifs and extracts drawn from German history, among which helmets, flags and war memorials held a central place and key importance. During this time (1976), the artist was appointed Professor at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste (Academy of Fine Arts) in Karlsruhe .
Following his more historical cycle, Lüpertz developed his ‘grand style’, where he flirted anew with an abstraction born almost 30 years previously. This capacity to look back would be stretched through time, space and (art) history, with artists such as Poussin or Corot finding their way under Lüpertz’s brush in his Serienbilder in the 1980s.
In 1977, he enjoyed his first retrospective, organised at the Kunsthalle in Hamburg. The positive reception and press it received paved the way for successive shows in prestigious institutions such as Berne, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven.
In 1986, he was named Professor at the Kunstakademie (Fine Arts Academy) Düsseldorf, becoming the school’s director two years later.
Noteworthy retrospectives include: Kunsthalle, Hamburg (1977); Museo Nacional, Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (1991); Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris (2015).
Lüpertz has been awarded the following prizes: the Villa Romana Prize (1970); the German Critics’ Association Prize (1971); the Lovis Corinth Prize (1990); and the fourth Julio González Prize (2004). Lüpertz was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Wrocław Fine Arts Academy in 2006.
Lüpertz lives and works in Berlin, Karlsruhe, Düsseldorf and Florence, painting, writing poetry and occasionally playing jazz piano.
