(born in Liberec in 1941)
Frau + Hund - Mädchen, Baum + Tod - Rumänische Landschaft (Woman + Dog - Girl, Tree + Death – Romanian Landscape),
2005, artist’s monogram ML, titled and signed twice on the reverse M Lüpertz, oil on canvas, 200 x 162 cm, 217 x 182 cm (framed), artist lead frame

Provenance:
Private Collection, Germany

Exhibited:
Muzeul National de Arta Cluj, Romania, April/May 2005
Markus Lüpertz painted this work especially for the
exhibition in Romania

Markus Lüpertz has had a decisive influence on contemporary painting since the 1960s and is one of the key artists of the German post-war period. He created the term “dithyrambic painting” in reference to Nietzsche’s Dionysian Dithyrambs, echoing Dionysus’s aspect as the god of eternal return and affirmation of life.
Markus Lüpertz’s monumental paintings are only visible fragments of a greater whole that only the painter himself knows. The works encompass opposing views of form within themselves, and often refer to art-historical contexts, which are deliberately intended to irritate the viewer and encourage him to engage with the work more closely. With each of his works Markus Lüpertz gives us viewers a riddle. His apparently clearly structured, excessively titled paintings, such as Woman + Dog - Girl, Tree + Death - Romanian Landscape, convey both monumentality and presence, unambiguity and relativism, full of power and everyday forms and yet on the other hand contain archaic elements. The tree trunk, for example, signifies power and human energy, which is simultaneously constrained by the skull.
“Painting for me consists of lines, colours, shapes. And of professional conviction. A painter paints. And since the painter is still alive while painting, he encounters things. He finds objects, outside and inside the picture. This is one of the main drivers of my curiosity, leading me to paint again and again. Because I can accommodate things that preoccupy me, whether objects, faces, hands, or the paintings of other painters. In addition, my special ability to evoke a memory through randomly occurring processes, dripping paint, for example, which I then pursue further in order to arrive at a familiar, intact or deformed object. ... I begin with the unfamiliar in order to find the familiar and then release myself again into the unfamiliar. Roughly speaking, it’s like a puzzle. There are a thousand parts, and suddenly the picture is right. Hardly anyone knows the reason. Maybe I know it or maybe you know it. Only when the picture is not right, then everyone knows it immediately.”
excerpt from: Markus Lüpertz im Gespräch mit Hans Peter Schwerfel, 1989, exhibition catalogue, Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna, Markus Lüpertz, 2.7.-18.9.1994, Klagenfurt 1994, p. 160