“Sohn der Sonne” (Son of the Sun)

Details

Provenance:

Private collection, North Rhine-Westphalia, acquired directly from the artist.

Description

Jörg Immendorff designed the set and costumes for Igor Stravinsky’s opera “The Rake’s Progress” at the Salzburg Festival in 1994. In his exploration of the subject matter, Immendorff created visual worlds that are widely recognised in his painterly work. For a new production of Igor Stravinsky’s opera “The Rake’s Progress”, he is thus artistically exploring the very opera whose subject matter is based on a visual model: the series of paintings and engravings of the same name by the English painter William Hogarth. Between 1733 and 1735, Hogarth created numerous depictions of the decline and fall of Tom Rakewell, the profligate son and heir of a rich merchant who squanders his money in London and ends up in a lunatic asylum. In the present composition, Immendorff portrays the English painter. The “Son of the Sun” demonstrates Immendorff’s artistic virtuosity and special talent for the effective reception and reinterpretation of art-historical motifs and thematic complexes. Immendorff has interwoven symbols of vice, transience and art in various pictorial layers to create a haunting testimony to human and artistic self-reflection.

– Particularly typical composition of high narrative quality

– The expressive, large-format work has been in the family for over 20 years and is on the auction market for the first time

– Works from the 1990s are particularly sought-after and can be found in the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and the Centre Pompidou, Paris, among others