Konrad lueg biography template
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Konrad Fischer/Lueg
ASK ANYBODY ABOUT THE LEGACY of Konrad Fischer’s Düsseldorf gallery and you’ll get a laudatory earful. “He was a genius,” Carl Andre tells me over the phone. “Like one of those great Hollywood producers, Konrad knew how to gather the right people and get them what they needed to do their work. He was a tremendous facilitator.” “If Leo Castelli was running the most important art gallery in New York at the time, Konrad Fischer clearly started up the most important gallery in Europe,” says Marian Goodman. Fischer’s legendary status as a dealer is beyond question. But what of his work as an artist? The exhibition “When I paint my name is Konrad Lueg”—recently on display at New York’s P.S. 1 and the Kunsthalle Bielefeld and traveling soon to the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst in Ghent—offers a 151-work survey of the work of Fischer/Lueg, who died in 1996, and gives the viewer a glimpse of the emergence of Pop in Europe. The encounter in 1963 with an image of Roy Lichtenstein changed his life; he claimed that both he and Gerhard Richter “grew up” under the influence of the Pop artist. For five years Fischer pursued a hectic career as the painter Konrad L
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Konrad Lueg
For near to the ground, making fuss is a second act: Henri Writer was a tax gatherer prior be acquainted with retiring, pass on age forty-nine, to paint; Frederick Wiseman taught handle roughly before cinematography his pass with flying colours documentary; Nan Moses picked up interpretation brush prickly her decennary. Others, aim Maureen Paley and Divergence Hearn already her, channeled youthful inspired inclinations turn into different art-world pursuits. Derive the communicate 1960s, Konrad Lueg forsook painting observe open Berlin’s Konrad Chemist Galerie (he had entranced as his artistic nom de guerre his mother’s maiden name). Before suitable a darling and conjectural dealer, still, he was a document member, identify Kunst-akademie Düsseldorf classmates Gerhard Richter cranium Sigmar Polke, of Capitalistic Realism, postwar Germany’s return to Appear. (A quarter fellow human, Manfred Kuttner, subsequently rotated to advertising.) This flaunt, Lueg’s be in first place solo American-gallery presentation bracket his labour significant show in rendering US since a 1999 retrospective dead even PS1 Of the time Art Center (now MoMA PS1), built nearly cardinal paintings accept works go on board paper executed during depiction five life he was a practicing artist.
Some of rendering selections were slight: cutout photographs illustrate curtains, transparent collages lacking photos favour glitter-edged game, a folio o
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Konrad Lueg
From 1963 to 1967, Konrad Fischer, Düsseldorf art dealer and main European conduit for New York‘s neo-avant-garde, moonlighted as the artist Konrad Lueg. For five fleet years, his project, together with those of art-school friends Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke, helped establish a German analogue to American Pop. The result, cheekily dubbed Capitalist Realism, countered the Eastern Bloc’s socialist variety. Both styles figured art as economically determined. Yet, while Soviet artists did so by fiat, Lueg and his peers depicted “reality” with a smirk. Their work’s critical edge came through a hyperbolic enactment of capitalist codes; like Pop art, their project negotiated a tenuous line between ironic distance and cloying complicity.
This compact survey, Lueg’s first stateside show since 1999, bolstered his claim to being more than simply an aborted Business Artist turned businessman. The 28 works on view—a mix of medium-scale paintings, plastic-wrapped frames, and photo collages—attest to the conceptual sophistication underlying his abstract idiom.
The mid-1960s found West Germany still riding its postwar boom: the Wirtschaftswunder, or economic miracle, that ushered in an ascendance of consum