Art Calendar – Current Exhibitions in Germany

Role model for the neo-Fauves, exponent of a new German historical painting, Jörg Immendorff (1945–2007) set standards with his art. Under the title Affentheater (i.e., Charade), the Art Gallery of the Jesuit Church in Aschaffenburg is now showing about seventy works, particularly paintings and sculptures, of an artist who also made headlines in fields apart from art: as owner of the La Paloma-Bar in St. Pauli in the 1980s, portraitist of the then Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and defendant in a court case involving cocaine use.

Immendorff first came to public attention with neo-Dadaist actions in the late 1960s. A politically engaged artist, he was particularly concerned with the East-West conflict. Together with his artist friend A.R. Penck, who was then still living in East Germany, Immendorff treated the conflict in the mid-1970s in the series Café Deutschland, in which sixteen large-scale pictures, for which the Düsseldorf discotheque Revolution served as the model venue, showed fictional guests negotiating the German question.