German contemporary artist Ruperts
Opening a solo exhibition at Daejeon’s ‘Heredium’
A man in a striped suit and a hat walks in, leaning on a cane with eyes drawn on it. “I’m too old for jeans and I don’t like sneakers,” he says, and he is the respected German painter Markus Luppertz (pictured). I recently met him at a hotel in Seoul, where he is holding a solo exhibition in Korea.
Lupertz is known for dressing formally and avoiding cell phones and computers when he leaves his studio. He explains that in an age where everything is easy and convenient, he follows the rules of dress code, “to separate myself when I’m painting from when I’m outside the studio.”
“I wear loose clothes and an apron in the studio, but my clothes always get dirty because I’m painting. If I look like a soldier going to battle, I try to look clean when I leave the studio.”
The tendency to not shy away from old discomforts is also connected to the art world that insisted on painting when various genres such as conceptual art and performance art appeared. Along with Anselm Kiefer and Georg Baselitz, who are now world-renowned painters, Ruperts is called a ‘neo-expressionist’ artist in the 1980s and brought painting back into the spotlight.
33 paintings and 8 sculptures he created from the 1980s to the present are on display at his solo exhibition, “Sin, Myth, and Other Questions,” at the Daejeon Cultural and Artistic Space, “Heredium.” Ruperts created the concept of “Ditirambeu” paintings, which he called “painting for painting’s sake, passionate painting.” He brought “Ditirambeu,” a hymn to Dionysus from an ancient Greek epic, into art, saying, “There are more stories to be told about Dionysus, who is more sensual and emotional than Apollo.”
Regarding the background to his interest in conversation, he said that it was influenced by the situation after World War II.
“In the latter half of the 20th century, American artists transformed European traditions into abstract expressionism and pop art, but they became somewhat stylized and mannerist, like Jackson Pollock’s splashes of paint or Roy Lichtenstein’s cartoonish drawings. While France and the United States were competing, Germany quietly found a new way in painting.”
Among the works on display, there are several works that are rooted in Greek mythology but branch out into other forms. ‘Poussin – Persian Assassination’ (1990) displays some of the works of 17th-century French painter Nicolas Poussin, with a Cubist-style still life next to it. Rupperts said, “I think Poussin’s paintings, in which the artist sets up the paintings like a theatrical stage, are the first abstract paintings,” and “I reinterpreted them by expanding their unique composition into abstraction.” In addition, you can see the ‘Arcadia’ series, which is based on the motif of utopia in Greek mythology, the figure series featuring characters from mythology, and the still life series with the theme of ‘Seven Deadly Sins and Three Questions.’
Reporter Kim Min [email protected]
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2024-09-24 21:54:33