Oil and tempera on canvas.
166 x 125 cm (65,3 x 49,2 in)

With a photo expertise by the artist

PROVENANCE: Private collection South Germany.

Since 1992/93, Markus Lüpertz has been working on a sequence of paintings, drawings and gouaches subsumed under the heading of “Men without Women Parzifal”. What is so remarkable about these works is that the artist is continually varying technique, format and style, the motif always remains the same. All these works feature heads: heads in continually varied form and expression. Apart from works in which surfaces and the representational are dominant, Lüpertz has also produced a few works such as ours, in which he has consistently driven forwards the interest he showed towards the close of the 1970s in the various forms of abstraction. By printing paintings on a different canvas and then processing the result, he succeeds in defamiliarizing the initial representational picture. In our work, for example, only the black contours as well as the nose and neck of a head blown up to the margins of the picture are recognisable. Thus Lüpertz has succeeded brilliantly in making the process of abstraction, which otherwise takes place out of sight in the artist’s mind, visibly intelligible to the viewer. [JS].

In good condition.