Markus Lüpertz
The Maker of Gods

Markus Lüpertz, one of the leading artists of German Neo-Expressionism alongside Georg Baselitz and Jörg Immendorff, is showcasing his work from March 5 to September 4, 2022, in Orléans, at locations including the Musée des Beaux-Arts, downtown, and Pasteur Park.
A “image-maker” [Bildmaler] and “prince of painters,” Markus Lüpertz serves as a bridge in contemporary art between the different eras of painting—a medium and subject he has embraced since his earliest days. By exhibiting in downtown Orléans, at the Museum of Fine Arts, and in Pasteur Park—where his work engages with classical collections—he follows in the footsteps of the great masters, from whom he has drawn inspiration for the expressive power of form for sixty years. This form, which he, like Delacroix, conceives of as a hieroglyph, has guided him since his arrival in West Berlin in 1962. His *Dithyrambs* established the young artist as the innovator of a pictorial tradition that emerged in reaction to the primacy of the image in Pop Art. For Lüpertz—as later for his friends Baselitz, Penck, and Immendorff—the subject is merely a pretext, a motif that the painter transcends in favor of color and its emotional power.

Starting in 1981, sculpture became an integral part of his practice, as if breaking free from the canvas in a creative impulse that still drives Lüpertz today. His discovery of Maillol opened the doors to a world without barriers between the arts, where the form he pursues from canvas to canvas—like “a chain that continues”—breaks free from the painting to fill the space. After working on stage sets and, later, stained glass, sculpting with materials allowed him to achieve an expressive power on par with that of the greatest artists.

My paintings have come to be populated by beings and objects that, at some point, stepped off the canvas. I moved on to figurative art, and then to sculpture. Matisse, Picasso, Degas… Painters who also sculpt are part of a great French tradition. And, unlike the works of the sculptors of their time, theirs are magnificent.

Similarly, in Lüpertz’s work, the arts respond to and nourish one another. The exhibition invites visitors to step into the creative process behind Markus Lüpertz’s work, into this Orphic universe where series of paintings become preliminary sketches for the monumental sculptures installed throughout the city and are thoroughly explored in the dynamic drawings on display in the print rooms on each floor of the museum.