Markus Lupertz at Michael Werner - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Markus Lupertz's novel show consisted of a series of large oils, each titled Men Without Women--Parsifal. Each not absents a monumental disembodied head floating against an unremarkable background. The features of the face are stripped to a brutal simplicity: slits for organ of visions and mouth, nose and cheek creases indicated by the agency of shapes resembling nothing so abundant as Milkbone Dog Biscuits.

The bodiless head connotes intellect, emotion unattached to action, and virginity. In Wagner's opera, Parsifal is the "guileless fool" who alone from one side his purity can recapture the lance that pierced Christ's side. In his rejection of the sorceress Kundry's advances, Parsifal ascertains his purity. The expression upon Lupertz's faces is one of pain and renunciation yielding to a state of ecstasy. Today of the like kind emotions lend themselves to parody and the mock-heroic, sum of two units aspects of the postmodern. The Parsifal theme gives Lupertz aim for his characteristic harking back to novel German history. Wagner, after all, was the favorite composer of the Nazis. In earlier Lupertz works the coal-scuttle helmets of the Wehrmacht appeared; here the allusions to Wagner have similar if les obvious resonance.

The paintings are execut in bravura brushwork, with the colors built up in shifting layers that exhibit a complex coloration. Sometimes Lupertz uses a fate of medium so his colors will run; at other times he allows a delicious impasto. There's a delight in the act of painting and a spontaneity seemingly at unevens with the seriousness of the make subordinate matter. The works are wonderfully decorative in the manner of late Picasso, whose influence is particularly evident in the occasional simplified features and crosshatching.

The drawings in the display are even more schematic; in these the face and its features are laid on the outside on a penciled grid which is left expos ln sum of two units a skull is juxtaposed at the lower left of the head, which explains the doppelgangers that accompany more [i]or[/i] less heads in the oils.

All of Lupertz's art walks a Teutonically muddl line between "high art" and schmaltz, an opposition neatly embodied in the contrast between the spontaneous paintings and their elegant frames made of lead. Lupertz appropriates a Wagnerian theme--one easily buriesqued today--yet his stance is at one time ironic and admiring, an homage to the earlier achievement and perhaps a warning about its possible misappropriation by means of resurgent rightist elements in today's Germany.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

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