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拍品專文
‘[Jörg Immendorff] wants painting to take him to where he hasn’t been, to where he intuits to go. He looks back across the history of his forms and motifs, his own life, and rereads them from a different perspective, experiencing them anew, finding surprises in their associations with new forms’ (K. Power, ‘Jorg Immendorff: The Light and the Night’ in Jörg Immendorff: Neue Bilder, exh. cat., Galerie Michael Werner, Cologne, 2006, p. 29).
Executed in 2006, Jörg Immendorff’s Untitled is a captivating large-scale example of the artist’s late practice. Laced with art historical reference and stylistic collisions, the work bears witness to the artist’s richly layered, deeply personal iconography, cultivated throughout his lifetime and pursued until his death in 2007. Like his contemporary Georg Baselitz, Immendorff’s latter works sought to rework motifs and symbols from his earlier oeuvre in conjunction with images drawn from past and present realities. In Untitled, a honeycomb-like grid of evenly-spaced circles recalls Sigmar Polke’s iconic raster dots, overlaid with images drawn from the canon of art history. A scene from Goya’s ‘Disasters of War’ series is juxtaposed with graphically-rendered statuesque figures, including an inverted vanitas image reminiscent of Cranach. Immendorff was struck by illness in the final stages of his life, and these works are the product of an intense reflection on artistic outlook. As Kevin Power has written, ‘Illness gave Immendorff the recognition that what he had been saying no longer sufficed. It was not simply a matter of a physical restriction but above all a mental and emotional recognition within the self … He wants painting to take him to where he hasn’t been, to where he intuits to go. He looks back across the history of his forms and motifs, his own life, and rereads them from a different perspective, experiencing them anew, finding surprises in their associations with new forms’ (K. Power, ‘Jörg Immendorff: The Light and the Night’ in Jörg Immendorff: Neue Bilder, exh. cat., Galerie Michael Werner, Cologne, 2006, p. 29).
Immendorff’s subversive artistic language first began to develop whilst he was still a student under Joseph Beuys during the 1960s. His political activism within the ruptured social landscape of post-War Germany inspired a new generation of artists, in particular Martin Kippenberger and Albert Oehlen. His acclaimed series paintings, including Café Deutschland, Café de Flore and The Rake’s Progress,
addressed issues of history, politics and cultural identity. His late works, many of which engage current affairs within their art-historical assemblages, extend the eclectic vocabulary nurtured in these earlier series, presenting the viewer with ghosts of the past and fleeting visions of the present. As Power describes, ‘Disturbed by a strange beauty, all is sent to the final flames. Immendorff reviews his life, his times, his work, events that pulse parallel to his actual daily living and hurls them all on the pyre and from there they surge, like a phoenix, back to life. It is a shadow-world of nocturnal vision, like the wondrous last quartets of Beethoven, a massive unyielding rebellious gesture of goodbye and at the same time a massive affirmation of the energies of life, a chaotic rushing of a multiple image-world through his consciousness: impressive, generous, deeply moving’ (K. Power, ‘Jörg Immendorff: The Light and the Night’ in Jörg Immendorff: Neue Bilder, exh. cat., Galerie Michael Werner, Cologne, 2006, p. 29).
Executed in 2006, Jörg Immendorff’s Untitled is a captivating large-scale example of the artist’s late practice. Laced with art historical reference and stylistic collisions, the work bears witness to the artist’s richly layered, deeply personal iconography, cultivated throughout his lifetime and pursued until his death in 2007. Like his contemporary Georg Baselitz, Immendorff’s latter works sought to rework motifs and symbols from his earlier oeuvre in conjunction with images drawn from past and present realities. In Untitled, a honeycomb-like grid of evenly-spaced circles recalls Sigmar Polke’s iconic raster dots, overlaid with images drawn from the canon of art history. A scene from Goya’s ‘Disasters of War’ series is juxtaposed with graphically-rendered statuesque figures, including an inverted vanitas image reminiscent of Cranach. Immendorff was struck by illness in the final stages of his life, and these works are the product of an intense reflection on artistic outlook. As Kevin Power has written, ‘Illness gave Immendorff the recognition that what he had been saying no longer sufficed. It was not simply a matter of a physical restriction but above all a mental and emotional recognition within the self … He wants painting to take him to where he hasn’t been, to where he intuits to go. He looks back across the history of his forms and motifs, his own life, and rereads them from a different perspective, experiencing them anew, finding surprises in their associations with new forms’ (K. Power, ‘Jörg Immendorff: The Light and the Night’ in Jörg Immendorff: Neue Bilder, exh. cat., Galerie Michael Werner, Cologne, 2006, p. 29).
Immendorff’s subversive artistic language first began to develop whilst he was still a student under Joseph Beuys during the 1960s. His political activism within the ruptured social landscape of post-War Germany inspired a new generation of artists, in particular Martin Kippenberger and Albert Oehlen. His acclaimed series paintings, including Café Deutschland, Café de Flore and The Rake’s Progress,
addressed issues of history, politics and cultural identity. His late works, many of which engage current affairs within their art-historical assemblages, extend the eclectic vocabulary nurtured in these earlier series, presenting the viewer with ghosts of the past and fleeting visions of the present. As Power describes, ‘Disturbed by a strange beauty, all is sent to the final flames. Immendorff reviews his life, his times, his work, events that pulse parallel to his actual daily living and hurls them all on the pyre and from there they surge, like a phoenix, back to life. It is a shadow-world of nocturnal vision, like the wondrous last quartets of Beethoven, a massive unyielding rebellious gesture of goodbye and at the same time a massive affirmation of the energies of life, a chaotic rushing of a multiple image-world through his consciousness: impressive, generous, deeply moving’ (K. Power, ‘Jörg Immendorff: The Light and the Night’ in Jörg Immendorff: Neue Bilder, exh. cat., Galerie Michael Werner, Cologne, 2006, p. 29).