Markus Lüpertz (born Reichenberg, 25 April 1941) is a contemporary German painter, sculptor, writer and art educator.
In the 1960s, Lüpertz worked primarily in Berlin, moving on to take a professorship at Karlsruhe at the Academy of Fine Arts Karlsruhe in the 1970s, then to Düsseldorf where he was director of the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, an art academy in Germany for over 20 years .[1]
During his early career as a painter, he won the 1970 Prize from Villa Romana and the 1971 "German Association of Critics Prize."
As a writer, he has been editing his own journal since 2003, called Frau und Hund of which two editions in other languages have appeared (Signora e cane, in Italian, and Femme et Chien, in French).
In 2011 Lupertz exhibited a new body of work entitled Pastoral Thoughts at the Michael Werner gallery in New York City. According to the brochure, these are "New works by the celebrated and controversial German artist [which] explore themes of history and abstraction in paintings derived from landscape motifs." The show "is the artist’s first major New York showing since 2005." The exhibition was accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue.
As head of the Kunstakademie he was famed for patriarchal behavior and extravagant leniency towards certain rules and ethics within the school. Rumor has it that he once signed the application form of a student solely because it was funny that she handed it to him at a book signing. Another story goes that he also had large silver rings cast for each professor and a gold one for himself, which he designed, bearing the insignia of the academy. These rings facilitate the opening of beer bottles and may have been inspired by the work of J. R. R. Tolkien.