Cafe de Flore I, 1997/2003

A member of the Neue Wilde movement, Jorg Immendorff received acclaim for his largely figurative work across the mediums of painting and sculpture – Jorg has explained the reason for his figurative style by simply stating: ‘something is beautiful if it is honest’. Among Immendorff’s earliest works was the LIDL group of performances, sculptures and paintings, all of which depicted iconographic motifs that one could expect to find among the make-believe world of a child - motifs included playhouses; goldfish, turtles and dogs, and the body of work was created as a derisive criticism of the present artistic pretensions. Immendorf was influenced by the works of Renato Guttuso, as evidenced in his Café Deutschland work - a series of sixteen large-scale, socio-political paintings that depicted disco-goers as a symbol of the division between East and West Germany. Immendorff was never afraid to challenge the social and political tensions of his time, and was on one occasion arrested for defaming the German flag after appearing outside West German Parliament with a wooden block tethered to his ankle – the block was labeled LIDL and painted in colours of the flag.