Markus Lüpertz is a contemporary German

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

 painter and sculptor.

In the 1960s, Lüpertz worked primarily in Berlin

Berlin

Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...

, moving on to take a professorship at Karlsruhe at the Academy of Fine Arts Karlsruhe

Academy of Fine Arts Karlsruhe

The State Academy of Fine Arts Karlsruhe, situated in Karlsruhe, Baden-Württemberg, is one of the smaller art schools in Germany with average 300 students....

 in the 1970s, then to Düsseldorf where he was for over twenty years director of the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf

Kunstakademie Düsseldorf

The Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, formerly Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, is the Arts Academy of the city of Düsseldorf. It is well known for having produced many famous artists, such as Joseph Beuys, Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, Thomas Demand, and Andreas Gursky...

, an art academy in Germany.

During his early career as a painter, he won the 1970 Prize from Villa Romana and the 1971 "German Association of Critics Prize." As a writer, he has been editing his own journal since 2003, called Frau und Hund

Frau und Hund

Frau und Hund is a German magazine of art, poetry and related subjects, including politics, published thrice yearly by painter Markus Lüpertz and edited by writer G.H. Holländer...

of which two editions in other languages have appeared (Signora e cane, in Italian, and Femme et Chien, in French).
Currently(2011) Lupertz is displaying his new catalogue of work at the Michael Werner gallery in New York City. The show brochure reads: New works by the celebrated and controversial German artist explore themes of history and abstraction in paintings derived from landscape motifs. “Pastoral Thoughts” is the artist’s first major New York showing since 2005. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue.

Trivia

As head of the Kunstakademie he was famed for patriarchal behavior and extravagant leniency towards certain rules and ethics within the school, rumor has it that he once signed the application form of a student solely because it was funny that she handed it to him at a book signing. It is notable that he also had large silver rings cast for each professor and a gold one for himself, bearing the insignia of the academy which he designed. These rings facilitate the opening of beer bottles and may have been inspired by the work of J. R. R. Tolkien

J. R. R. Tolkien

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, CBE was an English writer, poet, philologist, and university professor, best known as the author of the classic high fantasy works The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion.Tolkien was Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College,...

.