Jörg Immendorff

The artist

Thence by descent to the present owner

“For Immendorff what is valid, above all, is a clear and relatively narrowly circumscribed iconographic canon: ape and eagle are the preferred animal symbols which appear as allegorical images with various meanings in his paintings and as sculptures… The ape looks political facts in the eye: he is an observer of the world, a “survivor” who saves something from this “stage of history” for future generations. He is the alter ego who can let his spirit roam in order to interpret the world. The ape is co-artist, as it were; he is friend and enemy of the artist and his constant competitor.” (Heinz Althofer, Immendorff: Bilder, Heidelberg, 2000, p.160).

Since 2002, Jörg Immendorff created a series of sculptures, that depict apes engaged in various activities and in various positions. The series of sculptures was cast in three different sizes, of which the present work is the middle size. Immendorff in these sculptures emphasizes above all the apes human features, both in terms of their gestures and physiognomy as well as through their human expression of feeling, which is expressed in their playful and action-oriented movements. In this present work, he depicted a monkey holding potatoes. The potato is another important subject in Immendorff’s body of works, and for him it represents art. Art is something that is so very important for surviving, just as the potato.

Apes have been used as a subject in art history since the middle ages, as a subject of imitation, mimicking humans, such as artists with their figurative paintings would imitate nature. That is why Immendorff often portrayed himself as an ape, as well as his fellow artists. In this present work, Anselm Kiefer is being portrayed holding potatoes. Immendorff further titles his sculptures Malerstamm, which means tribe of painters and then adds the first names of well-known artists.