Winter of Theory:

Winter of Theory:

Works by Jörg Immendorff &Joseph Beuys

December 3, 2024 through January 28, 2025

Leo Koenig Inc. is pleased to announce the exhibition Winter of Theory featuring works by Jörg Immendorff and Joseph Beuys.  The gallery reopens after being closed for a time to grapple with, and honor the passing of Leo’s father and North Star to many of us, Kasper König.  Kasper’s presence will always be felt here, and will continue to both inspire and challenge us.

Winter of Theory highlights the two artists that were friends, allies, mentors and antagonists to each other.  A student of Beuys, Immendorff  often included visages of his artist friends, and Beuys figures heavily.  At the heart of Immendorff’s practice and his friendship with Beuys was an almost fundamentalist belief in the autonomy and authority of the artist.  And if Immendorff adopted a Beuysian vision of artistic freedom that was nearly absolute, he also absorbed from his mentor, the idea to place great emphasis upon the responsibility of the artist to act as an agent for social and political change.

In the painting Winter of Theory, Immendoff’s friend and colleague, A. R. Penck is depicted on what appears to be crumpled, discarded drawings that show Penck in a snowy landscape under a full moon. Today’s interpretation of the cryptic title Winter of Theory could be seen as a description of the precipice we currently standing on. With news cycles bombarding us with theories of the absurd, we await, crumpled on the floor, and prepare for winter.

Immendorff  was often asked to paint backdrops for significant performances of Operas. In the lush and triumphant canvas that is “Scene of Beauty,” Immendorff balances on a beam in the top right corner, with Igor Stravinsky conducting in the bottom right. The opera is based on the work of William Hogarth. Immendorff reinterprets two of Hogarth’s etchings within the work, The Bathos from 1764 in the bottom left, and John Wilkes from 1763 in the upper left. The complexity and overlap of Immendorff’s references is emblematic of his oeuvre, highlighting the cinematic and transformative quality of his work, inviting the viewer into the unfolding drama as a participant.

Joseph Beuys’ origin story also begins in Winter. In it, Beuys created the myth, that after his plane crashed in 1944, a group of nomadic Tartars found him and wrapped him in animal fat and felt to keep him warm. This origin story became a central part of Beuys’s artistic identity and underscored his use of materials, such as felt and fat. Beuys, believing that art could help heal society’s psychic wounds, he performatively used these materials in his “social sculptures” .

In Winter of Theory, multiples by Joseph Beuys made between 1968-1980 are arranged in a large vitrine, referencing a frequent presentation method Beuys chose to exhibit his work throughout his career. Always keeping forms of nature in mind, Beuys saw the vitrines themselves as symbolic of a stag with its large body and thin legs. In turn, the multiples illuminate a special place in Beuys’ oeuvre. Once famously proclaiming “if you have all my multiples, then you have me completely.” Beuys fixation on multiples was inspired by a desire to disseminate his ideas in a broader context.  Throughout his career, he created multiples of posters, objects, and collages, at times leaving them unsigned and belonging to unlimited editions.

Perhaps the conclusion of the exhibition lands upon Immendorff’s work “Domm Jorch, Wir Gehen,” which is a bronze sculpture depicting a monkey walking with figure whose visage appears as Beuys.  In 1985, Immendorff began using a monkey in his work to symbolize, a facsimile of his alter-ego.  Standing for opposites, and the ambivalence of the artist’s existence, he appears both silly and wise, as he walks away, with his friend and mentor, waving goodbye.

Joseph Beuys: (German, 1921-1986) Beuys was a renowned German performance artist, teacher, and art theorist who immersed himself in politics throughout his life. He is most renowned for popularizing the Fluxus movement–an international, interdisciplinary community of artists, composers, and designers in the 1960s and 1970s who foregrounded the experimental artistic process over finished objects. Beuys hosted “actions,” where acts of a ritual nature were performed. In his work Galleria Ferrari from 1978, Beuys is depicted with his hand out, as if he is addressing an audience, a few members of which you can see in the left-hand corner. His photographs were deeply influential in the postwar art world.

Educated in Rindern, Beuys served in the German Luftwaffe throughout World War II, and barely survived a plane crash. He was then held as a prisoner of war in a British internment camp until released after the war. Afterwards he pursued his educational interests in art and science, and then became an instructor of sculpture at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf as he honed his art practice. The most public collection of his work was installed in the Hessisches Landesmuseum in Darmstadt, where his work remains to this day. He also represented Germany at the Venice Biennale in 1976 and 1980. His works remain in the collections around the world.

Jörg Immendorff was a German painter known for his color soaked figurative style and use of symbolic imagery. Taking cues from artists such as Georg Grosz, Max Beckmann, and Otto Dix, his paintings stood in opposition of his peers Markus Lupertz and A.R. Penck. “Something is beautiful if it is honest,” Immendorff had said. “If you do an engaged piece of work, which is sincere, the concept of beauty meets the concept of truth.” Born on June 14, 1945 in Bleckede, Germany, Immendorff studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under artist Joseph Beuys. Immendorff’s popular painting series Café Deutschland from the 1970s, combined autobiography with social and political commentary, often including his former tutor Beuys within the painted scenes. Immendorff’s first exhibition in the United States was held in 1982 at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and he died May 28, 2007 in Düsseldorf, Germany at the age of 61 from complications due to ALS. Today, the artist’s works are held in the collections of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum, the Weserburg Museum of Modern Art in Bremen, and the Art Institute of Chicago, among others.

The Gallery is open by appointment.  Please call us at 212.334.7866 OR email us at info@leokoenig.com to arrange an appointment.