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拍品专文
Painted in 1985, Jörg Immendorff’s large-scale Je Vous Salue Maria (I Salute You Maria) is an enthralling psychological drama rendered in deep, robust colour. The carnivalesque spectacle is laced with political and religious references, exemplifying Immendorff’s richly layered and deeply personal iconography which confronted the theme of a shattered German identity. Indeed, the staging of ideological conflicts was central to the artist’s practice, evident in the collision of histories presented in Je Vous Salue Maria. A darkened crowd of shadowy figures gathers, their spectral forms mirroring the flames that lick at the large cauldron. To the right, a crucified Hitler, nailed down by paintbrushes, graces a large green cross extending over the entire phantasmic scene. Bursts of blue and orange flicker and fade. Immendorff’s subversive visual language first developed while he was studying under Joseph Beuys at the Dusseldorf Art Academy, and like his teacher’s, Immendorff’s early works, too, were imbued with a sense of mysticism. By the 1970s, however, his aesthetic shifted as his paintings began to incorporate elements of the propaganda posters that papered the divided country. The ensuing works were chaotic and vertiginous, and Immendorff’s style reached its full maturity with the frenetic series Café Deutschland, paintings from which are held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Tate Modern, London, among others. Aligning his practice to those of Weimar-era artists George Grosz and Max Beckmann, Immendorff’s paintings, wrote Roberta Smith, were ‘suave sendups of bravura brushwork and history painting imbued with sardonic commentary’, (R. Smith, ‘Jörg Immendorff: ‘Café Deutschland’’, New York Times, 31 October 2014). Continuing the furious visuals of these paintings, Je Vous Salue Maria is a surreal landscape, where colour melts and burns. For Immendorff, art was an assertion of a radical politics, and in this urgent image is the dream for a better tomorrow.