Jörg Immendorff

Jörg Immendorff (14 June 1945 – 28 May 2007) was a German painter, sculptor, stage designer and art professor.

He was a member of the art movement Neue Wilde.

Immendorff was born in Bleckede, Lower Saxony, near Lüneburg on the west bank of the Elbe.

When he was 11 years old, his father left the family.

This traumatic experience has been used to explain Immendorff's later feelings of inadequacy and emotional remoteness.

He attended the boarding School ←Ernst-Kalkuhl Gymnasium as a student.

At the age of sixteen he had his first exhibition in a jazz cellar in Bonn.

Beginning in 1963, Immendorff studied at the Art Academy in Düsseldorf (Kunstakademie Düsseldorf).

Initially he studied for three terms with the theater designer Teo Otto.

After Otto threw him out of his class for refusing to let one of his paintings serve as stage-set decoration, Immendorff was accepted as a student by Joseph Beuys.

The academy expelled him because of some of his (left-wing) political activities and neo-dadaist actions.

The first body of work that Immendorff gave a name to were his LIDL paintings, sculptures, performances, and documents, that he executed during 1968–1970.

The name, "LIDL" was inspired by the sound of a child's rattle makes and much of his work from this period included the iconography of new beginnings and innocence.

LIDL is comparable to Dadaist but unlike the Dadist movement it never became an established group but rather consisted of a variety of artists (including James Lee Byars, Marcel Broodthaers, Nam June Paik, and Joseph Beuys) participating in actions and activities.

The art-historian Pamela Kort wrote this of Immendorf's LIDL works:

"LIDL ridiculed elitist art traditions, the cult of creative 'genius', and the precious aesthetic object. The artist countered these hierarchies by assembling a body of pretentious iconographic motifs drawn from the make-believe world of the child – turtles, dogs, goldfish, playhouses, and polar bears – which he transformed into the 'working material' of what he hoped would be a new functional art form."

In January 1968 he appeared in front of the West German Parliament in Bonn with a wood block labeled “Lidl” tethered to his ankle and painted in the colors of the German flag; he was subsequently arrested for defaming the flag.

From 1969 to 1980, Immendorff worked as an art teacher at a public school, and then as a free artist, holding visiting professorships all over Europe.

Since the 1970s, he worked closely with the painter A. R. Penck from Dresden (in East Germany).

Immendorff was a member of the German art movement Neue Wilde.

Immendorff created several stage designs, including two for the Salzburg Festival.

He designed sets for the operas Elektra and The Rake's Progress.

The latter also inspired a series of paintings in which he cast himself as the rake.

Best known is his Café Deutschland series of sixteen large paintings (1977–1984) that were inspired by Renato Guttuso’s Caffè Greco; in these crowded colorful pictures, Immendorff had disco-goers symbolize the conflict between East and West Germany.

In 1984, Immendorff opened the bar La Paloma near the Reeperbahn in Hamburg St. Pauli and created a large bronze sculpture of Hans Albers there.

He also contributed to the design of André Heller's avant-garde amusement park "Luna, Luna" in 1987.

For three months, from 1987 until 1988, Immendorff was the foreign artist in residence at the Auckland Art Gallery in New Zealand, attracting a lot of attention in the local scene there.

In 1989, he became professor at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main and in 1996 he became professor at the Art Academy in Düsseldorf—the same school that had dismissed him decades earlier as a student.

His master students at the Düsseldorf Art Academy included Oda Jaune and Renata Jaworska.

Jörg Immendorff often worked in "grand cycles of paintings" that often lasted years at a time and were political in nature.

Notable cycles include LIDL, Maoist Paintings, Cafè Deutschland , and The Rake's Progress.

Immendorff created various sculptures; one spectacular example is a 25 m tall iron sculpture in the form of an oak tree trunk, erected in Riesa in 1999.

In 2000, Immendorff married his former student Oda Jaune.

The two had a daughter, Ida, who was born on 13 August 2001.

In August 2003, Immendorff was caught in the luxury suite of the Steigenberger Parkhotel in Düsseldorf with seven prostitutes (and four more on their way) and some cocaine.

More cocaine was found in his studio; all in all, the found substances contained 6.6 grams of pure cocaine, above the legal threshold for personal use.

In interviews, Immendorff attempted to explain his actions with his terminal illness and as an expression of his "orientalism" that provided inspiration for his work.

In 2006, Immendorff selected 25 of his paintings for an illustrated Bible.

In the foreword he described his belief in God.

A major 2019 survey began at the Haus der Kunst in Munich and later traveled later to the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid and the Fondazione Querini Stampalia in Venice, curated by Francesco Bonami.