Jörg Immendorff’s Café Deutschland series (1977–1984) treats the divided Germany as a nightclub. The canvases are crowded, saturated, and perspectival — political allegory rendered as comic-strip stage. Tables of symbolic figures, national emblems, and historical references recur across multiple paintings, building a narrative argument about partition and identity that is rare in the movement.
The series has a theatrical structure: recurring characters, recurring motifs, a cumulative argument. The palette is aggressive — high-contrast reds, blacks, and yellows. The brushwork is fast and illustrative rather than thickly impastoed. Where Kiefer’s series are material accumulations and Baselitz’s are solitary figures, Café Deutschland is social allegory.
Immendorff collaborated with A.R. Penck on some of the paintings, bridging the East/West divide in practice. The series was exhibited widely, including at Documenta 7, and remains Immendorff’s central contribution.
See also
- Jörg Immendorff — the artist
- A.R. Penck — the collaborator
- Documenta 7 — institutional ratification