WASHINGTON, DC.- Opening on May 27, The Phillips Collection presents an exhibition celebrating prolific German artist Markus Lüpertz. Curated by Phillips Director Dorothy Kosinski, Markus Lüpertz explores the entirety of the artist’s five-decade career with a survey of his earliest works along with more recent paintings. Organized in close collaboration with the artist and his long-time gallerist Michael Werner, the exhibition was first inspired by a generous gift in 2015 of artworks from Werner’s personal collection.

Markus Lüpertz, who began painting in a postwar Germany dominated by American Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, has exhibited a preoccupation with the relationship between figuration and abstraction over the course of his career. Demonstrating this relationship through nearly 50 paintings, the exhibition at the Phillips includes important examples from Lüpertz’s “dithyrambic” pictures and provocative paintings of German motifs.

“Throughout his remarkable career, Markus Lüpertz has insistently challenged and provoked art historical givens and the norms of modernism,” said Phillips Director Dorothy Kosinski. “Painting is a life ethos for him in which he grapples with fundamental issues of art and living, enabling us to see and understand our world.”

The Phillips exhibition is on view at the same time as Markus Lüpertz: Threads of History, an in-depth exploration of the artist’s revealing early work curated by Evelyn Hankins at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. In this first formal collaboration between the Phillips and the Hirshhorn, the exhibitions together mark the first in-depth U.S. survey of Lüpertz’s practice, allowing American audiences to see the full creative evolution of a leading neo-expressionist artist of his generation.