This large-format painting is a work by multidisciplinary artist Markus Lüpertz, who is considered one of the most important representatives of German Neo-Expressionism. Born in Bohemia, he studied art from 1956 to 1962 at the Krefeld School of Applied Arts and then at the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie (where he then taught from 1986 to 2009). In 1962, he moved to Berlin and became interested in the history of European art and especially in Picasso, in whom he saw an art of Dionysian celebration. In 1966, he published his Dithyrambic Manifesto. Since the late 1980s he has been reflecting on the past, taking up classical themes in painting and sculpture.

Our oil on canvas is very representative of this artist’s universe. It is a closed composition with three recognizable figures in what is probably a Dionysian celebration. A character sits at the centre of the canvas with a figure standing in front of him, and there is a woman sitting on the left. The roughly sketched characters are in an open-air landscape, or at least an illusion of the outdoor is created by the dominant green colour.
At the back of the scene, a few quickly sketched lines on the white background intrigue the viewer, as they disrupt the balance of the composition. In spite of its monumental format, the painting is reminiscent of a unfinished study, an impression accentuated by the paint on the edge of the frame of the canvas. However, this is certainly not the case: this Neo-Expressionist painting, with its misleading appearance of hasty execution and its return to an almost wild Primitivism, expresses the revived autonomy of European painting vis-à-vis the American values carried by the dominant international market.