It’s hard to say if art can make a difference in a divided society. Are LaBeouf, Rönkkö and Turner going any way towards stopping Trump with their flag work? Did Jeremy Deller’s T-shirt campaign have any impact on Brexit? Well, you can be a cynic about it, or you can be an optimist. German painter Jörg Immendorff (1945-2007) was more the latter, and seemed to think that art and artists could genuinely shape political discourse.
The earliest works here are bold, simple images of protests. Features are thick, strong, broad – they’re works you could spot from miles away. They’re mural-like statements, showing the artist as present in the heated turmoil of political life, wading waist-deep through a divided 1970s Germany. It’s meant to be art for the people, and if it wasn’t in a swank Mayfair gallery it might just work.
But it’s when disillusionment crept in that he really got going. Three late ’70s canvases are apocalyptically surreal maelstroms of colour. People dance and fight under fiery skies while politicians pontificate and spies conspire. These are brilliant war-riven, paranoid hellscapes.
Later works find the artist wrestling with more personal demons. He navigates art history and collage in a series of turbulent grey paintings made as he suffered with motor neurone disease. The enormous works downstairs are super-ambitious, but not a patch on the earlier pieces. The smaller, simpler paintings, though, feel full of the old same Immendorff fight, but aimed inwards. They’re angry, tempestuous things.
Did all of Immendorff’s political bile have any impact? Or was his forthright art just a lot of painterly piss in the wind? Maybe what really matters here is that he tried.
