Aus der kleinen Straße - dithyrambisch, 1965

About the Work

‘From the Little Road – Dithyrambic’ shows a mysterious object. Markus Lüpertz borrowed the ‘dithyramb’ – a hymn in honour of Dionysus, the god of wine – from Friedrich Nietzsche. It became the central metaphor in his early paintings, where he distances himself from abstraction and figuration, and from Western styles to the same degree. The construct is peculiarly suspended in space, seeming to appear from nothing. Can it be called an object at all? Lüpertz’s dithyrambic paintings are convincing by their sheer elementary and existential vehemence.