Markus Lüpertz’s expressive practice combines cultural touchstones with wild, gestural marks to produce rich worlds of fierce, animated paint. Although his work is figurative, fixed narratives and interpretations often fail in the face of his sensorial imagery and vibrant colour, and Christie’s is thrilled to present two of his beguiling canvases. For the earlier Leuchterfenster, 1989, Lüpertz has painted a slender candlestick alongside a fragmented window. The colours are beautifully wistful, muted blue, a verdant green, and swathes of rose. Lüpertz’s brushwork looks like pentimento, as if there was another image hidden beneath, as if Leuchterfenster was forever in the process of becoming. Equally enigmatic is Männer ohne Frauen. Parsifal, 1993, part of a series of works alluding to Wagner’s opera Parsifal, one of which is held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Wagner’s epic narrates the story of Parsifal and the Holy Grail, and the young man is the key to earthly salvation, but only if he remains naïve to the world’s realities. In Lupertz’s rendering, it is impossible not to see a young man’s face emerge out of the blank oval decorated with heraldic crosses, and although featureless, he appears to be weeping.

Lüpertz came of age in post-war Germany, and his practice has helped to chronicle and shape the changing image of the country. Straddling figuration and abstraction, the artist’s first significant contribution to contemporary was the ‘dithyramb’, which as both an ethos and an image, has affected nearly all of his subsequent work. Inspired by Dionysian chants, in his dithyrambs, Lüpertz either builds up patches of colour into nondescript objects or, conversely, ‘re-form[s] a simple motif until – like a word chanted too many times – it lost its original meaning’ (M. Gray, ‘Everything I know comes from painting’, Apollo, May 20, 2017). Over the decades, the artist has painted a diverse array of motifs, and in his renderings, they become illogical and confounding. In making figuration abstract, Lüpertz revels in the truth of humanity; as the artist himself said,‘Painting provides the vocabulary to make the world visible’ (M.Lüpertz quoted in Markus Lüpertz, exh. cat., Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D. C., 2017, p. 6).