The Artists Of Today : Germany

Characteristic of the work of Ulrich Ruckriem (born in 1938) are huge dolomite blocks such as those with which he created the Heinrich Heine Memorial in Bonn. Jorg Immendorf (born in 1 945) is a kind of modern history painter. In his picture “Cafe Deutschland”, the storm of history blows the Berlin Wall away. In March 1997, Immendorf was awarded the Mexican “Marco Prize”, the world’s largest art prize (USD 250,000), for his work “Accumulation 2″. Anselm Kiefer (born in 1945) shapes massive works of art from materials such as dust, flower petals, ashes and roots in his factory-hall studios. “Zwei-stromland” is the name of a 32-ton sculpture consisting of 200 books made of lead on shelves eight meters long. He call his pictures, many of which are inspired by mythology, “picture bodies” because with his usually untreated materials he lends sculptured volume to the two-dimensionality of traditional painting.

Rebecca Horn (born in 1944) presents sculptures as “performances” and uses them in her own films. Gerhard Richter (born in 1932) is a master of ambiguity on the border between representational and abstract art who skillfully shifts at will from representation reminiscent of the Old Masters to the most extreme forms of abstraction. He categorically rejects interpretations of his work. Ceorg Baselitz (born in 1938), who has won many awards and gained an international reputation, expresses in his upside-down pictures the misery of the human creature. Of primary importance to him is not that which is portrayed but rather the actual doing and artistic freedom. Markus Lupertz (born in 1941), the current director of the Dusseldorf Academy of Art, projects a “drunken, rapturous” feeling of life with his “dithyrambic painting”. Lupertz is one of the fathers of the new (”wild”) representational painting in western Germany, although he has always avoided wild gestures and splurges of color. Sigmar Polke (born in 1941) plays - often ironically - with shifts between different levels in his pictures. He frequently uses printed cloth as a painting surface, employing printing blocklike symbols to lend it a significance of its own.