In conjunction West Bund Art & Design 2020, the gallery is pleased to present a detailed look at “Painter as Canvas”, a major work by Jörg Immendorff. Painted in the year following the fall of the Berlin Wall, this is an important work to revisit now, on the thirtieth anniversary of German reunification.

The early 1990s are a period in Immendorff’s oeuvre that uniquely address the artist’s inquiry into his identity and participation within his own paintings. The artist’s presence inside his own work should not be seen as a classical self-portrait, but more as a participation in the collective atmosphere built within the canvas. Immendorff’s art is a deep reflection on the role of the artist in an age of collective and political commitment, during a time when the artist as an individual was seen as a symbol of bourgeois conservative attitude.

In “Painter as Canvas”, we can see Jörg Immendorff sitting on the lap of his forebearer, the artist Max Ernst. For Immendorff, the use of art as a tool for self-analysis and emancipation is key, and can be seen here in his role-playing as an infant, while his physique, in contrast, is that of an adult. Ernst illustrates various expressions like “Sturm” and “allemande” and “inspection de merde” onto Immendorff’s whitened face. Immendorff’s makeup recalls the 1943 French film “Les enfants du paradis”: a masterpiece of irony and tragedy, and filmed under extreme political restriction, the film’s five protagonists are by fate bound together for life, and the figure “Garance” loses himself off-stage in his Pierrot costume.
 

Installation view: “For All Beloved in the World”, Reina Sofia, Madrid, 2019

In Immendorff’s works from the 90s, the stage itself is a nod to the acting techniques popularized in the ‘Epic theater’ of Bert Brecht, based on Erwin Piscator’s term developed at the Volksbühne in Berlin in the mid 1920s. These innovations emphasized function over form and content, intending to arouse a reaction of the audience through interaction, deliberately engaging the viewer and force them to confront their reality. However, Immendorff notes that he preferred the contradiction and abstraction of the opera to the theater stage. In 1986, Immendorff designed the set and costumes for a production of Richard Strauss’s opera “Elektra” at the Stadttheater in Bremen. He speaks about this in the attached conversation with curator Pamela Kort (who also organized the Munich retrospective) where they discuss this painting in depth. In “Painter as Canvas”, the artist wearing a pantomime mask refers to his own past pantomime efforts, as well as his work on “Elektra” where the main character Clytemnestra wears a similar mask.

“Painter as Canvas” evokes a stage, with another scene – a dream or allegory – in the background hovering above the pair. The set-up of the settee and table with two wine glasses is typical for the iconic “Café” series of the artist, while in the foreground to the left we can see a heap of potatoes, a direct link to Immendorffs early work “ Die Kunst muss die Funktion der Kartoffel übernehmen.” Art needs to be as vital, nurturing and ubiquitous as the role of the potato in society in order to create meaningful and lasting societal change.

Immendorff observes in an interview with Hans-Ulrich Orbist:

I knew about Brecht before I went to Beuys. I spent three semesters with the stage designer, Teo Otto, who at that time was world famous, and had worked in Zürich, in the Scala, with Reinhardt and with Brecht, about whom he often spoke enthusiastically and whom I was also reading. But then I switched to Beuys. The scene and the spatial aspects I found interesting and also the view from the stage into the audience, this turning things around and being after all part of the audience.

The red sofa, in Immendorff’s vocabulary a ready-made, is at the same time an illuminated floating island in the blue waves of a timeless void with harsh shades that mark the space outside of the actual scene, as well as a nod to Lucian Freud. We feel we are observing a dream sequence in which the artist serenely opens himself up to his own vulnerabilities and enters the subconsciousness.

Jörg Immendorff (1945-2007) is one of the most influential German artists of the 20th Century, known for a body of work that challenged both artistic and political establishments. After Jörg Immendorff initially studied set design with Teo Otto at the Staatliche Kunstakademie in Dusseldorf for two years, he switched to the class of Joseph Beuys in 1964. During the turbulent time of student unrest, Immendorff used painting in connection with his actions - performance art and installations he grouped under the term  LIDL - which eventually led to an uproar and the artist leaving the academy abruptly in 1969. Immendorff achieved his artistic breakthrough in 1977 with the iconic “Café Deutschland” series, in which he was able to symbolically depict the historical situation of his country. The painted objects he had already used in his actions now grew into monumental sculptures. Following the reunification of Germany that he had prefigured in his work, Immendorff focused even more strongly on the question of the artist's point of view, visually presenting the “world question” in the form of paintings. The “Café de Flore” series became the starting point for this exploration in 1990, while the artist’s late paintings depict an amalgamation of iconic art historical motifs that have influenced the artist’s life and career.

Since the mid-1960s Immendorff exhibited regularly throughout Germany. Early on, he participated in documenta V in 1972, and was included in the Venice Biennial in 1976. From that time gained further exposure throughout Europe and internationally. Important exhibitions include Haus der Kunst, Munich; Reina Sofia, Mardrid; Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Municipal Museum, The Hague; Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City; Kunstmuseum, Bonn; Kunsthalle Düsseldorf; Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; and Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, among many others. In 2007 Museum Kunst Palast, Düsseldorf organised a sweeping survey of the artist’s drawings. Immendorff began teaching as a professor at the Staatlichen Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1996. In 1998 he was awarded the highly distinguished Order of Merit from the Federal Republic of Germany. Immendorff lived and worked in Düsseldorf and Hamburg until his death in 2007.