Jörg Immendorff | Markus Lüpertz

Jörg Immendorff and Markus Lüpertz are among the most recognisable and influential figures in post-war German art, and both achieved enormous international success.

Born in 1945, Immendorff worked not only in painting and sculpture. He taught at numerous schools for many years before becoming a professor in 1996 at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, from which he had been expelled in 1969 because of his political involvement (the artist studied in Joseph Beuys’s class). Immendorff led a turbulent life for many years, culminating in his arrest and conviction in 2003 for possessing substantial quantities of cocaine and participating in numerous orgies. Shortly after Jörg Immendorff’s death in May 2007, the American magazine Time wrote that a great artist had died—one who, like no other, had developed the tactic of shock and an ability to analyse precisely the paradoxes of post-war Germany.

The life of Markus Lüpertz—a painter, sculptor and writer who has also published his own magazine, Frau und Hund, since 2003—was associated successively with Berlin, Karlsruhe and Düsseldorf. Professor Lüpertz has been rector of the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf for twenty years.