Press release
From January 13 to February 23, 1999, Galerie Michael Werner in Cologne will be showing works from the painting cycle "Monte Santo" by Markus Lüpertz.
"Monte Santo", created in 1998, comprises 14 paintings in the dimensions 250 x 200 cm as well as a 300 x 300 cm canvas, which have the theme of the Stations of the Cross as their model; a theme that has been interpreted again and again in the history of Western art since the 16th and 17th centuries. In all these representations, the sign of the cross is at the center of formal design and content statement. Its formulation and orientation in the picture and the sequence of the works result per se in the logic of the narrative and leave no doubt about the dramatic interpretation of the Stations of the Cross. Markus Lüpertz's contemporary interpretation not only continues this tradition, but elevates the cross to the sole picture-determining form. At the same time, however, he subordinates the motif to a painterly interpretation of the picture plane and - following the laws of varying color and form compositions - creates abstract formulations that combine to form new pictorial objects.
Similar to his "Landscape Paintings" from 1997 and 1998, in which Lüpertz took the representational motif as an occasion to dissolve the boundaries of abstract and representational painting, in order to ultimately transfer it into a new form of painting, "Monte Santo" also proves Lüpertz's ability, by virtue of painting, to add a new meaning to the traditional by referring to the familiar and re-evaluating it.
"In this way, he updates the historical process and detaches it from its Christian meaning to contemporary events. For all his abstraction, Markus Lüpertz becomes a political painter with his Stations of the Cross," Ulrich Scheider, director of the Suermondt-Ludwig-Museum in Aachen, also writes in his text for the exhibition's bilingual catalog.
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