Markus Lüpertz

Markus Lupertz was born on April 25, 1941, in Reichenberg, then in Bohemia and now Liberec in the Czech Republic. His family emigrated to Rheydt in the Rhineland in 1948. He studied at the Werkkunstschule in Krefeld from 1956 to 1961 under Laurens Goosens, a period that included an educational stay at Kloster Maria Laach, where he painted an early series known as the Crucifixion Paintings (Kreuzigungsbilder). He also spent a single semester at the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf, from which he was expelled after a conflict with the school; one documentary account describes him being sent down following a fight. Available sources do not document a completed formal degree.

In the early 1960s, following his studies, he moved to Berlin. His first major exhibition was held in 1973 at the Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, and he took part in the 1st Berlin Biennale in West Berlin in 1974. He went on to teach as professor of painting at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Kunste Karlsruhe from 1974 to 1986, and then served as rector of the Staatliche Kunstakademie Dusseldorf from 1988 until his retirement in 2009. He received an honorary doctorate from the Academy of Fine Arts in Wroclaw in 2006. He is married and has five children. As of 2026, he continues to live and work, based between Dusseldorf and Berlin, with a studio near Berlin in Teltow, and multiple 2026 sources, including a June 2026 Brooklyn Rail interview, describe him as actively exhibiting.

Lupertz is treated in institutional and gallery writing as a central figure in the postwar German return to figurative and mythological painting, alongside Neo-Expressionist contemporaries such as Baselitz, Immendorff, and Penck. His first comprehensive US museum exposure came in 2017, when the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden presented "Markus Lupertz: Threads of History," focused on his pioneering work from the 1960s and 1970s, while The Phillips Collection mounted a concurrent survey of nearly fifty works spanning his career, together described by the Phillips as his first US retrospectives. Institutional and gallery writing consistently frames his decades-long output as carrying strong emotional, historical, and personal content, a characterization consistent with the broader critical view of his work as history and myth carried through an expressive, painterly language.

The best documented public auction result for Lupertz in the available research is a six-part bronze ensemble, "Pietrasanta Bronzen: Frau mit Spiegel. Der Schauspieler. Mann mit blauem Ball. Der Gärtner. Odaliske, Akt mit Spielzeug," sold at Lempertz in Cologne on or about June 5, 2014, for approximately EUR 293,000 (Lempertz's own price index and Artsy both list EUR 292,800 including premium). Lempertz and Artsy identify this as the artist's current public auction high, though available sources do not confirm it as an absolute all-time ceiling across his full auction history.

Lupertz has no published catalogue raisonne, so provenance and verification through his representing galleries, Almine Rech and Michael Werner, and his own studio, carry added weight. His auction market is comparatively thin in publicly confirmed top-end pricing, and the one clearly documented high result, from a 2014 Cologne sale, should be read as the best available data point rather than a certain all-time ceiling. His standing rests most heavily on decades of museum surveys, academy leadership, and a firm place within the generation that revived figurative painting in Germany, rather than on a small number of headline auction prices.