(Bleckede/Elbe 1945–2007 Düsseldorf)
Untitled, 2007, inscribed, dated FF 07, oil on canvas, 200 x 179 cm, framed

Provenance:
European Private Collection

“Jörg Immendorff's work can be seen as an ongoing quest to redefine both the role of art and his own existence as an artist - against the backdrop of a nation whose social and political landscape is undergoing massive shifts. Immendorff rejects the idea that art should only carry aesthetic meaning: his extensive body of work is characterised by an unshakeable conviction that the arts are an instrument of political action that both identifies and instigates social change.”
(Ulrich Wilmes, Foreword, in: Haus der Kunst München, Jörg Immendorff. Für alle Lieben in der Welt, 2018)

Immendorff’s works are, therefore, a political space in which the past can be reflected upon and history is thematised. He provides various entry points in his works to open up levels of interpretation for the recipient, trapping him or her in a narrative web by using literary, artistic and historical protagonists who drive the viewer into a discursive debate.

Jörg Immendorff comes from a generation of artists who are shaped by the collective memories of war and political life. However, at the same time they distance themselves from the moral understanding of their parents’ generation in order to view the past in a different way and finally come to terms with it (Haus der Kunst München, Jörg Immendorff. Für alle Lieben in der Welt, 2018, p. 4). In his works, Immendorff, a student of Joseph Beuys, also repeatedly poses the question of what role artists in post-war Germany take on or have to take on.
The present work belongs to Immendorff’s late oeuvre and, typical of his paintings of this time, is full of symbols. Immendorff deliberately mixed different temporal levels and built pictorial quotations and spaces into one another for this purpose. In the late 1990s, Immendorff changed his painting style to come to terms with his diagnosis of a neurological disease called ALS. He dealt with themes like transience and death, often interpreting images from the early modern period. He quoted particularly frequently from the works of the German Mannerist Hans Baldung Grien, and Albrecht Dürer also served as a source of inspiration.

Immendorff’s late works are refined narratives composed of art historical quotations and biographical elements. Transience takes on an ever-greater significance, and the paintings are often reminiscent of depictions of the apocalypse in their design. Compared to the works of his early period, the paintings of his late period are much calmer and more existential. Taken as a whole, these works are a haunting testimony to the artist’s preoccupation with illness, decay and death. Immendorff died in 2007, the year in which the painting shown here was created, as a result of his incurable nervous illness.