Markus LÜPERTZ
As an opening exhibition, Arario Seoul presents the works of Markus Lüpertz, one of the leading artists of the German Neo-Expressionism. Lüpertz was born in Liberec, Bohemia(Czech Republic) in 1941 and studied at the Art Academy in Düsseldorf, where he is now a professor. He is considered to be among the most important contemporary artists in Germany.
Emerging as a reaction against abstract painting prevailing in the 1970s, Neo-expressionism is characterized by intentional distortion of natural forms including the human body and rough brushwork for intensively subjective, emotional effect. Lüpertz mixes this Neo-Expressionist approach and a lot of other styles he chose to tell us various stories. His paintings, created with vigorous brushwork, are not only the archeology which shows a variety of styles in art history but also contain the memories of something that were constituted by collective imagination. In fact, Lüpertz experienced estrangement in the rich social environment of West Berlin which he moved to from the former East Germany in the year of 1963, the peak of economic activity. Understanding that the pursuit of utopia in West Germany was a mere illusion, he began to express the spiritual poverty contrasted with the material affluence after the war, increasingly inclined to more implicit rather than explicit approach. This resulted in overlapping of physical forms and past memories on the surface of the canvas, as well as the unique encounter of the two.
His works presented in this opening exhibition range from his paintings of the 1980s to the recent series of Nude Back and some sculptural works. You can find the traces of the artist’s long investigation in the abstract and concrete forms rooted in his philosophical life and hear the subtle reverberation between the only vaguely recognizable forms and the rich stories within them. Especially, Nude Back series will give you a valuable opportunity to see the forms created on the basis of a full understanding of the human body and the artist’s insight coming from his artistic inquiry.
Though Lüpertz is not so much popular as other Neo-Expressionist like Anselm Kiefer or Georg Baselitz, he has gradually established himself in the world art scene through many solo and group exhibitions since the 1980s. We think this opening exhibition will show Arario Seoul’s will to keep pace with contemporary art. We are looking forward your attention in this show and hope to see you in other exhibitions held in Arario Seoul in the future, too.
