Apocalypse (1973) is an oil painting by Markus Lüpertz from his dithyrambic period, held at the Art Institute of Chicago. The title invokes the Dionysian ecstasy that Lüpertz named his entire late-1960s and early-1970s project after.
Close looking
The palette is saturated and high-contrast: saturated reds, ochres, and blacks that read as flame and smoke rather than natural light. The gesture is rapid and unblended — paint applied with tools other than the brush, dragged across the surface in broad, urgent bands. The composition is turbulent; there is no single focal point, only a field of competing energies that the title gathers under the sign of revelation.
The impasto is thick in places, thin and washy in others, creating a topography of paint that catches light unevenly. What reads first is the violence of application: the canvas is not described so much as assaulted. Lüpertz’s dithyrambic claim — that paint is Bacchic ritual, not description — is enacted here. The body, if there is one, is dissolved into the gestural field; the mass of the image is carried by the paint itself, not by any depicted figure. The texture ranges from scored and scratched passages to pooled, liquid areas where the medium has been poured and allowed to settle.
See also
- Markus Lüpertz — the artist
- dithyrambic-painting — the theoretical frame
- formal-grammar — vehement paint as declaration