Lot 646 D

''Lüpertz' landscapes are visual expeditions. Sailing on the 'see' of painting, he steers a risky course between the physical world and its picture. Added to this he must also 'break' from life. Relinquished to the port of complacency, he weighs anchor and travels the navigable water of melancholy struggle. […] When reviewing Lüpertz' paintings of the years 1993-97, one notices the shift in the handling of motifs that surrounds and underlies these landscapes. The motif world of men without women, Parsifal dissolves into semi-abstract global forms; the parodic vanitas motifs (farcical skulls, ravens, fish) which followed in 1996, transformed into the wintry twilight landscapes of 1997. This motivic metamorphosis mixes the mindset of the plaintively-creative reverie (men without women, Parsifal) with ridicule about the finitenss of life (vanitas motifs), and in an unsentimental break with this world, leads to an aesthetic tendancy to the sylvan solitude. In his more recent forest pictures Lüpertz paints the way to the threshold of an unknown place. If this distant goal had a name, then it could be the grail, an alias for paradise, as one of these new pictures is also called.
It is not surprising that these works, as all of Lüpertz 'exteriors', are paradoxical. Even their central motif of the tree (an essentially German emblem) is 'different'. These trees have nothing in common with the green, rustling, lofty forests of German Romanticism. They also differ from the idyllic, albeit sparse trees often found in Expressionism, as well as from the eerie and desecrated woods of apocalyptic landscapes. One can call these forests German only insofar as they, like northern Gothic art, are neither narrative nor descriptive. Their theme is the deep individuality of their originator. In this sense, Lüpertz landscapes could be called the stage setting of the ego.'' (Pamela Kort, Eine Welt Abseits, Ein Exkurs, in: Markus Lüpertz, Neue Bilder, exhib.cat. Galerie Michael Werner Köln, Köln 1997, p. 5)