Jorg Immendorff Artworks, Paintings and Exhibitions at the Saatchi Gallery

Jorg Immendorff's most famous accomplishment is his Café Deutschland series, begun in 1977 and continued through the 1980's. His imaginary nightclub sits on the east-west border, an independent territory where the burlesque theatre of cold-war politics, national identity, and battle of artistic legacy is played out night after night in all its subterfuge and drama. This series of work takes its initial architecture from Renato Guttoso's Café Greco, but in painting after painting the ‘camera angle' shifts, the furniture is rearranged, and the action is captured in contorted perspective of the not-so-innocent bystander.Jorg Immendorff presents a canvas divided in three parts: labour, knowledge and possibility. His central figure, a goddess-like woman embodying an owl of wisdom, is the icon nurture and virtue, radiant against the bleak background of storm clouds and darkness. Through her flows a stream of fertility and rebirth in the form of labia-like fruits, proffered from the toil of the rural worker.Jorg Immendorff paints an art hero's Valhalla. In a living-room-cum-art studio-cum-club, he gives the illusion of theatrical space. Images within images, he builds an architecture through the placement of paintings throughout the room, confusing masterpiece with reality.Jorg Immendorff presents an allegory of creation: surrounded by heroes of ideological importance, an onion springs forth from a richly fertile womb. Jorg Immendorff once said that painting ‘has the function of a potato'. Here it's reborn in the multilayered richness of ideological and intellectual nourishment.

Jorg Immendorff, who studied with Joseph Beuys during the 1960s, has been more a satiric conceptualist than a painter of primal feeling. His huge "Cafe Deutschland" paintings, which set elaborate allegories of German politics and culture in nightclub interiors, made him famous in America in the 1980s. In this, his first exhibition of new work in New York since 1987, Immendorff presented one elephantine painting loosely based on Stravinsky's opera The Rake's Progress, along with a set of small, whimsical works on paper.Immendorff's style lies somewhere between painterly expressionism and political cartoon; equally revered and populist. Exaggerating each element to its graphic extreme, Immendorff uses paint as a means to negotiate his own position through documenting a 20th century zeitgeist. Operating like medieval religious painting, Immendorff not only presents the story of our time, but questions the morality and ethic of an increasingly frivolous society.Immendorff, the act of painting extends beyond creative function: it becomes the most relevant means by which an individual can make an impact in history: measuring oneself against the world, taking a personal viewpoint, and creating real meaning from contemporary existence.