Markus Lupertz made Homage to Mozart (2005), the most aggressively modernist of Salzburg's Mozart monuments. The large bronze at Ursulinenplatz near the Gstattentor depicts Mozart in a loose, semi-abstract style that has nothing to do with the idealised portrait tradition. Some visitors love it. Some find it wrong.
The Story
Markus Lupertz was born in 1941 in what is now the Czech Republic and built his career in West Germany as one of the leading figures of the return to figuration in German art. From the 1960s onward, while minimalism and conceptual art were dominant internationally, Lupertz and a group of painters including Georg Baselitz and Anselm Kiefer developed a neo-expressionist figuration that was deliberate, loaded, and often uncomfortable.
He served for many years as director of the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf, one of Germany's most significant art institutions, and his own paintings and sculptures are in major museum collections across Europe and beyond.
His contribution to Salzburg is a single sculpture: Homage to Mozart (2005), a large bronze figure installed at Ursulinenplatz near the Gstattentor. Where the city's other Mozart monuments tend toward reverence and clarity, Lupertz's work is loose and ambiguous, the figure recognisable but distorted, the homage genuine but unsettled. It is the kind of monument a city commissions when it wants to signal that it takes art seriously rather than just tourism.
