Immendorff - Male Lago

Jörg Immendorff (1945-2007)

In his youth, Jörg Immendorff was an assistant at Joseph Beuys's legendary performance How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare. As he describes here in an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, when Beuys complied with his dealer's request to rearrange the stage for commercial reasons ('I need the stuff we can sell at the front.'), Immendorff stuck a red dot on Beuys's vest, the international sign that a work has sold, and in this case the scarlet letter of the sellout. Immendorff remains as politically and personally engaged today.

Male Lago, a gigantic scrapbook and portfolio almost three-and-a-half inches thick and weighing in at 880 pages, tracks his work from its earliest and most political days through to his recent paintings and quietly wry brass monkeys.