Mixed media on canvas, 150 x 285 cm
"Men without women. Parsifal" is the title of a series of pictures that Markus Lüpertz painted between 1993 and 1997. They were to become his most famous works. This series shows a man's face in many variations, often crying. The origins of this theme go back to the Middle Ages: Richard Wagner - to whom Lüpertz refers - wrote the opera of the same name. Its plot is in turn based on Wolfram von Eschenbach's medieval novel about the knight Parzival and varies the themes of female temptation and redemption in a male world.

Markus Lüpertz (*1941 in Reichenberg, today Liberec, Czech Republic) is one of the most successful contemporary German artists; most of his works belong to the Neo-Expressionist movement. After working in Krefeld and Düsseldorf, Markus Lüpertz and other young painters founded the famous self-help gallery Großgörschen 35 in 1964 - among them the now renowned artists Karl Horst Hödicke and Bernd Koberling. The young painters wanted to set an example against the rigid established art business.

Today Markus Lüpertz lives and works in Berlin, Karlsruhe, Düsseldorf and Florence. His development as a painter ranges from "dithyrambic painting" (1962, named after a song of praise to the god Dinonysos from Greek mythology) to large-format paintings on the German past (1969 to 1977), style painting (1977 to 1984), series paintings such as the "Parsifal" series (1993 to 1997), landscape paintings (from 1997) and the series "Vanitas" (1999). His extensive oeuvre also includes stage designs, sculptures, the design of church windows as well as poetry and prose texts. Markus Lüpertz held professorships in Karlsruhe and Düsseldorf and was rector of the State Academy of Arts in Düsseldorf from 1988 to 2009.