He is one of the most important German painters of the second half of the 20th century and wrote art history as a representative of New Figuration. The comprehensive overview exhibition at the MKM Museum Küppersmühle places a special focus on the artist’s late work with works from the 1980s and 1990s. His artistic standing is still undisputed among experts, even if he is largely forgotten by the public today. With the exhibition “Painters, Thieves and Riff-raff” we want to counteract this.

The extreme formats of his paintings, executed in a violent style, are a particularly recognizable feature of his expressive and powerful art. Dieter Krieg anticipated the great success of the “Neue Wilde” in the 1980s. The selection in this exhibition demonstrates this with typefaces and monumental depictions of banal everyday objects such as fried eggs, chops, shower curtains, candles and more. In addition to their seductive, sensual quality, his paintings make the questionability of the representability of things particularly clear. Krieg was an obsessive reader, and his paintings are characterized by an affinity with the literature of his time, from Sartre and Beckett to Peter Handke, and the physical act of writing, which becomes another motif in the paintings.

Dieter Krieg, who studied under HAP Grieshaber at the Karlsruhe Art Academy, caused a sensation in the 1960s with his radical painting style. As early as 1966, he was awarded the German Youth Prize in Baden-Baden for his depictions of bodies tied up and bandaged beyond recognition. In 1978, he represented Germany at the Venice Biennale. As a professor at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, he influenced an entire generation of younger artists.