Jorg Immendorff at Michael Werner

It is hard to look at the late Jorg Immendorff's recent work without thinking about his robust 40-year career or the challenge of making the very large paintings while suffering from advanced Lou Gehrig's disease (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis). Gone are the lurid lighting effects and exaggerated perspectives of the '80s, and the politically charged German narratives. Immendorff here embraced a more individualistic symbolic content. The five oversize untitled paintings in this exhibition (all 2006) were derived from sources ranging from the master etchings of Durer, Hogarth and de Gheyn to photographs from magazines and newspapers. Immendorff continued to make Big Paintings redolent of Big Ideas: ideology, culture and the self; death and the body. But his jaunty tone had become elegiac, and the work's politics turned inward.

Bigness, for Immendorff, was always complicated by crappiness, which, in the vernacular of German painting of the '80s, indicated critical distance combined with a refined anarchist connoisseurship; the artist must not show too much interest in the painting's quality, or risk betraying its radicality. That attitude seems to have diminished, but not vanished, as Immendorff began to paint with the help of projectors and assistants.

In a few of the new paintings, trees spread across silvery twilit atmospheres with pages from wind-blown newspapers, magazines and illustrated books caught in their branches. While the only medium is oil on canvas, the various print technologies of the source images are imitated in the paintings' layered, composite worlds. In one, the biomorphic silhouette of a painter's palette encloses a simulated etching of a group of 18th-century men singing and, in the foreground, a woman in Renaissance-style biblical robes strolling across a landscape. The painting is bisected by an anamorphically stretched, photolike depiction of a man raising his hand, as if taking an oath, inside a transparent beaker--one of many alchemical images in these paintings, and suggestive of a desire for the transformational merging of their various parts. The oversize palette contains the chattering of many different pasts now orchestrated into Immendorff's enigmatic song of himself.

Another painting features a man flayed, as in a Vesalius illustration, and a vascular red plant with an image of a Siamese-twins hermaphrodite tangled in its leaves. It is one of several that promote analogies between inside and outside, individuals and the cosmos. In these new paintings, the melodramatic and activist aspirations of Immendorff's earlier work are sustained, but with a melancholic brittleness. A rusting cast-iron sculpture from 1999 of a dead tree trunk adorned with a palette and painter's maulstick was placed at the center of the exhibition like a 19th-century memorial to the Artist.

Immendorff's image pileups declare a resistance to legibility, underwritten by social outrage and aggressive narcissism. He created a politics of space in which his role was both performer and audience.

COPYRIGHT 2007 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning