Markus Lüpertz

born 1941 in Liberec/Bohemia, lives in Berlin and Düsseldorf

The painter has mounted his canvas “1840” flush with the end wall of the restaurant for Members of the Bundestag. His work employs motifs from the English painter William Turner’s (1775–1851) Rhine journey in 1840, into which he has woven allusions to the founding of the German nation state, light-heartedly linking the Spree and the Rhine rivers.

The artist has also incorporated motifs and sketches from earlier works in the painting, layering them on top of each other like a collage or hiding them behind grid-like structures. He has thus created a multilayered painting that alludes revealingly both to German history and to the development of German painting in its preoccupation with that same history.