BERLIN.-His unerring brushwork and the intensity of his paintings have made Markus Lüpertz one of the most important German artists of the twentieth century. In parallel with his painting, the rector of the Düsseldorf Art Academy has produced an extensive sculptural oeuvre. His best-known sculptures include Eagle, located at the Federal Court of Justice in Karlsruhe, and Mercury, which stands in front of the Post Tower in Bonn.

The present exhibition at Julius Werner Berlin documents the emergence of the artist’s ten-meter-high Mercury, messenger of the gods, on the basis of numerous bronze and plaster bozzetti, sections of the original casting mould, and drawings.

The bozzetti and drawings served to test ideas and check the progress of the monumental sculpture, which was virtually impossible to see whole during its execution. Each of the design sculptures reflects the inexhaustible possibilities of the medium. “Perhaps unexpectedly,” as Robert Fleck notes in the catalogue, “these preliminary works did not serve as means to systematically focus the visual and figurative idea of Mercury. Viewing the series of sculptures, it is as if we were watching Lüpertz at work. Each of them, we sense, represented a new beginning. The conviction that every sculpture should be based on an intrinsic visual conception is something Lüpertz shares with abstract painting, with which he feels closely allied, even though the employment of figurative emblems is just as important to him as the abstract gesture he applies to the figurative repertoire.... The series of bozzetti not only exemplify the workings of visual thinking. They also demonstrate the artistic freedom Lüpertz permits himself vis-à-vis sculptural traditions, be they premodern or contemporary.”