An inventive microcosm where history and politics collide in a cacophonous visual frenzy, Auf zum 38. Parteitag (‘Let's go to the 38th Party Conference’) is a powerful example of Jörg Immendorff's celebrated Café Deutschland series, which instantly propelled the German maverick to the international stage and counts among the artist’s best-known body of work, with other paintings of the series featured in the permanent collects ions of the Museum of Modern Art, New York and Tate Modern, London. Epitomising Immendorff’s vertiginous signature style, the present work is a supreme artistic accomplishment that lays bare the artist’s subversive visual language encompassing “elaborately conceived and executed extravaganzas that scramble cultural and political signifiers as if they were walk-ons in a cacophonous punk opera without a written score” (Robert Storr, ‘A “Painter’s” Progress,’ in Exh. Cat. Berlin, Neue Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Jörg Immendorff: Male Lago - Unsichtbarer Beitrag, October 2005 – January 2006, p.61).

An epic series encompassing more than one-hundred oil paintings, Immendorff began the Café Deutschland series in 1977 and remained engrossed by it for over a decade, dedicating the full force of his creative power toward meticulously analysing and deconstructing the geographical, political and psychological schism of his nation coming to terms with its identity following the Second World War. During the 1960s Immendorff had cultivated a name for himself as an artist-agitator. Driven by the potential of social transformation through art, an approach to ‘art-making’ very much influenced by his mentor and professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Joseph Beuys, Immendorff channeled the political landscape of late twentieth-century history into works that span performance, protest, and painting. Upon seeing Renato Guttuso’s Caffè Greco at an exhibition in Cologne in the mid-1970s, Immendorff remained spellbound by the Italian painter’s incongruous assemblage of personalities from different lands and ages, united within the confines of a popular Roman cafe. Taking Caffè Greco as starting point, Immendorf created an imaginary café, a conceptual space of sorts, loosely based on the Rattinger Hof, a Düsseldorf discotheque he often frequented. “I've always been interested in a new kind of imagemaking dealing with history that has more symbolic power than a mimetic depiction of actual events,” Immendorff explains, “once I got down in paint a certain reality that characterized not just Germany but our entire age, I had accomplished what I wanted to achieve in those pictures” (Jörg Immendorf cited in: Pamela Kort, ‘80s Then – Interview,’ ArtForum, March 2003, (online)). Developing an ambitious and idiosyncratically contemporary form of history painting, Immendorff’s project of reconciling the intricate complexities of the East/West divide is unrivaled for its complexity, both as an artistic and political stat.mes nt.

A vortex of vibrant colour, the boisterous scene depicted in Auf zum 38. Parteitag features a buzzing crowd of punk rockers intermixed with historical figures such as Adolf Hitler, Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin. The title, implying a proposal for a made-up Communist rally never to materialise, is embedded in writing in the very structure of the picture plane. Immendorff’s iconographic inventiveness ironically rendered in the artist’s appropriated, East-German endorsed socialist realist style knows no bounds: forlorn figures in acidic colours loom in dark crevices, the horse of the Brandenburg Gate encircles the composition, contorted, seemingly falling, upside down, while in the upper right corner another horse is clamped in the oversize hi-hats of a drum-kit. The utter madness of the t.mes is distilled in an anguished vision of clashing ideologies and disquieting iconographies, addressing “the situation of a divided Germany, but [the Café Deutschland paintings] are also about alienation. They represent my attempt to break through a wall - and not.mes rely the one that separated the former East and West Germanies. How odd is it that, despite the many ways we have of communicating with one another, we seem to be building up walls between ourselves rather than dismantling them. So the Café Deutschland paintings stand just as much for a then externally divided Germany as for the condition of an internally split man, who struggles to communicate not only with himself but also with his colleagues and lovers.' (Jörg Immendorff cited in: Ibid.).

Highly symbolic and theatrical, Auf zum 38. Parteitag belongs to a seminal body of work focused on the political and emotional division of Germany during the Cold War era, an urgent assertion of Immendorff’s radical politics and a painterly attempt at overcoming the arbitrary barrier of the Berlin wall. For Immendorff, painting was a means to educate and enact in the real world, not exist in an aesthetic realm utterly unto itself. With the present work and the series of vital paintings executed during the period of Germany’s divided state, Immendorff sought a form of political-educational agitation, “to live and change consciousness,” as the artist once explained: “This I would call social and political work” (Jörg Immendorff cited in: Jörg Immendorff and B. H. D. Buchloh, HIER UND JETZT: DAS TUN, WAS ZU TUN IST, Cologne and New York 1973, p. 218).