>A major retrospective of a major German artist, Jörg Immendorff, closed yesterday after a run of almost 2 months.

450 works, dating from 1968 to shortly before his death at 61 from ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) in May this year, the more recent works painted by his students working to his instructions.

His body of work is frequently overtly political and tends towards surrealism (and narcissism, with Immendorf himself featuring in a vast number of them) and – to me (and I’ll doubtless be stoned for my philistinism) reminiscent of some of Robert Crumb’s work.

Hugely popular exhibition – expected 12,000 visitors and they were up to 20,000-ish last Thursday.

He’s probably better known to the mainstream, though, for a patch of scandal in 2003 involving a luxury hotel suite, a bevy of willing nubiles and a bucket of cocaine (if you believe the tabloids).

It was actually 6 grams and 7 girls (although 4 more turned up during the raid… bloody hell!) and he got offr with probation and a whacking great fine.

And when you stop and think about – if you’re looking down the barrel of a gun whose trigger is slowly being squeezed and you know that at some stage, you’ll be in a wheelchair and then dead, I can understand his excesses.

I’d probably stick to beer, myself, though.

27 Aug This entry was published on 27 August, 2007 at 11:07. It’s filed under Mainz and tagged ALS, immendorff. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.