Press release
Galerie Michael Werner is pleased to announce an exhibition of late paintings by Jörg Immendorff (1945–2007), created during the last two years of his life.
The paintings from the time of Jörg Immendorff's advanced period of illness "show symbols of death, dark metaphors, threats to life and historical ruptures. Yet they are also suffused with a remarkable power resulting from uncompromising gesture of defiance on the artist’s part […]. This gesture of defiance, directed by art against history, was already the gesture par excellence in Immendorff's earlier work" (Robert Fleck, April 2007), but would be unthinkable without his poetry.
The diagnosis of ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis) in 1997 caused Jörg Immendorff to radically reconsider the way he was working. Undeterred by his impairment, Immendorff continued to work with great intensity. He experimented with various alternative methods of image-making, including stamping, stenciling, monotype, and offset, as well as the use of a whole cohort of assistants trained by him to implement specific parts of the production process under precise instructions. Art historical sources and early pictorial inventions were developed into compositions that address powerful meditations on mortality, resistance, and the massiveness of the assault on life.
With his late paintings in particular, Jörg Immendorff left behind an impressive contribution to his legacy, which has hardly been researched to date: Caspar David Friedrich, Hans Baldung Grien or Antonio Fantuzzi provide models from art history, which the artist incorporated into a dialogue with his own material from personal photographs, historical wallpaper patterns, or documentation relating to the performance art movement in the 1960s.
Jörg Immendorff’s work has been exhibited internationally since the mid-1960s. He participated in documenta V in Kassel in 1972, was included in the Venice Biennial in 1976, and from that time gained further exposure throughout Europe and internationally. Important exhibitions include Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Municipal Museum, The Hague; Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City; Kunstmuseum, Bonn; Kunsthalle Düsseldorf; Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; and Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, among many others. In 2007 Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf organised a sweeping survey of the artist’s drawings. In 2018, the Haus der Kunst in Munich presented a major retrospective titled "For All Beloved in the World", which traveled to the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid in 2019. In 1998 Immendorff was awarded the highly distinguished Order of Merit from the Federal Republic of Germany. Immendorff lived and worked in Düsseldorf and Hamburg until his death in 2007.
The exhibition is on view at Galerie Michael Werner, Cologne from 12 November 2021 through 19 Februray 2022. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Friday, 10 am to 6 pm and Saturday, 11 am to 4 pm.
