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Articles about Jorg Immendorff

Jorg Immendorff: I Wanted to be an Artist

By James Rosenthal

This expert survey of Jörg Immendorff's career reassesses an artist whose period of notoriety in America lasted a relatively short time in the 1980's. This was partly a matter of mistaken identity - he was too closely linked with the neo-expressionist and new image (?) bandwagon prevalent at the time. His connection to direct contemporaries who gained mega-celebrity status, Anselm Keifer and Gerhardt Richter, is also shown to be partly incidental. From this exhibition, Immendorff emerges more fully as an original artist of great complexity. This reevaluation also makes distinctions that remove him from convenient generalizations made about the "postmodern" Eighties, the Trans-Avant-Garde, and art generally, and it illustrates thoroughly the conceptual nature of his work.

Born in 1945, Immendorff was of the generation that experienced post-war disillusionment that politicized every waking moment. As a student in the 1960s, he faced the task of examining Germany's tragic history and its fraught relationship with modernity. This forced him to devise a balancing act between eras.

Immendorff subsequently takes on the multiple roles of jester, storyteller and historian. He actively participates in a self-conscious continuum of twentieth-century German art while simultaneously throwing stones at the powers that be. After running the full gamut of conceptual work á la fluxus, his adoption of painting appears as a sort of purposeful and elaborate bluff. Although this suits his needs, it makes the connection to Ludwig Kirchner and the original German expressionist group die Brücke seem almost superfluous. What comes to the fore instead is a weaving together of political, social and personal myth making. It is the content that matters most, putting him more in line with the social, satirical and metaphorical intents of George Grosz and Max Beckmann respectively. Read the entire article
Source: (www.artcritical.com)

Jorg Immendorff talks to Pamela Kort - '80s Then - Interview

ArtForum, March, 2003

PAMELA KORT: What were the signal moments in the '80s for you?

JORG IMMENDORFF: In 1982 I had my first large museum show in Germany at the Kunsthalle Dusseldorf, where my "Cafe Deutschland" [1978-82] paintings were featured. Shortly thereafter I participated for the second time in Documenta, and just a few months later "Zeitgeist" opened at the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin. This period was also important to me because of the interaction between the older generation of artists and much younger ones, like Walter Dahn and Georg Jiri Dokoupil, two of the Cologne artists grouped around the Mulheimer Freiheit. They had just been featured in a show at the Museum Folkwang in Essen, "Zehn junge Kunstler aus Deutschland." A few months later their work was also showcased at Documenta 7. It is seldom that an older and younger generation come to public attention at the same time. Then there were books and catalogues published like Hunger nach Bildern and La transavanguardia tedesca. Suddenly all Europe was reacting to the German art scene, not just France and England but also Italy, where painters such as Francesco Clemente and Sandro Chia were working. A big part of the response centered on the debate around so-called figurative painting. And of course it was also at this time that David Salle and Julian Schnabel, who were shown as well at "Zeirgeist," began to exhibit in Europe.
Read the entire article Source: (www.findarticles.com)

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