Jörg Immendorff at Galerie Alain Margaron, Paris: Painting the Divided Germany, and Painting Past the Body

Few painters of the late twentieth century staged history as theatrically as Jörg Immendorff. His canvases of the late 1970s and 1980s turned a divided nation into a crowded stage — eagles, flags, barbed wire, smoke, and the artist himself as a bewildered actor in the scene. The Jörg Immendorff exhibition at Galerie Alain Margaron, Paris, open from 5 November 2026 to 9 January 2027, brings around thirty works from 1979 to 2006 to a small gallery in the Marais, and in doing so offers Parisian audiences a rare, concentrated look at a figure better known in Germany than in France.

From Beuys’ classroom to the painted stage

Immendorff (1945–2007) studied at the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie, where Joseph Beuys was his teacher, and began in the 1960s with provocative, Fluxus-flavoured actions before taking up painting as a tool of political argument. By the late 1970s he had found his mature voice in large, densely populated pictures that dissected the post-war condition of Germany. He went on to teach and exhibit internationally, and remained one of the most recognisable German painters of his generation until his death in 2007.

Two chapters, one argument

The gallery organises the exhibition around two periods. The first is Immendorff’s return to painting, when he confronted the society of his day and its geopolitics — the division of Germany and the face-off between the blocs in Europe. Rather than illustrating headlines, he worked through symbols and allegories whose meaning stays open; the viewer is asked to read, not merely to recognise. The cover work, Auf die Plätze (1981), oil on wood, comes from this moment. Its title — the German equivalent of “On your marks” — has the feel of a starting gun, a fitting phrase for a decade defined by rearmament and nervous waiting.

The second chapter begins in the late 1990s, when Immendorff was diagnosed with ALS (Charcot’s disease) and gradually lost the use of his body. According to the gallery, this pushed him to reinvent his process altogether: he designed compositions on screen, used digital images, stencils, projections and prints, and directed assistants who executed the paintings with millimetric precision. What could have been an ending became a new method.

Authorship without the hand

This late work raises one of the most current questions in painting: what remains of authorship when the artist no longer touches the canvas? Immendorff answered it decades before AI image tools made the question fashionable. His late pictures keep the allegorical density of the earlier work, but their surfaces are cooler and more graphic, closer to the logic of the printed image. Seeing both periods side by side lets visitors judge for themselves whether the voice survives the change of technique.

The catalogue essay is by Fabrice Hergott, director of the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, who argues that the paintings are not simple autobiography: in his words, quoted by the gallery, « Immendorff ne peint pas pour transcrire ce qui lui arrive » — Immendorff does not paint to transcribe what happens to him.

A Marais gallery and a German painter

Galerie Alain Margaron, on rue du Perche in the upper Marais, is a gallery with a long-standing interest in figurative and expressionist painting. Its intimate rooms suit Immendorff’s pictures, which reward close, slow reading of their symbols. The gallery notes that the most recent Venice Biennale offered fresh evidence of Immendorff’s lasting influence on contemporary art; with a new generation of painters again mixing politics, narrative and theatrical space, the timing feels right.

Why it matters

• For collectors: a focused selection spanning almost three decades of a major German post-war painter, presented by a Paris gallery with a scholarly catalogue.
• For painters: a lesson in allegory — how to make political painting that stays ambiguous and alive — and an early, radical answer to the question of the artist’s hand.
• For visitors to Paris: an easy stop between the Musée Picasso and the galleries of rue Debelleyme and rue Vieille-du-Temple.

Visiting information

Galerie Alain Margaron, 5 rue du Perche, 75003 Paris. 5 November 2026 – 9 January 2027; the gallery does not publish an opening reception date. Open Tuesday to Saturday 11:00–13:00 and 14:15–19:00, closed Sunday and Monday. Phone 01 42 74 20 52 or 07 84 54 81 96. See our Immendorff exhibition listing, the official Galerie Alain Margaron exhibition page, and more shows on Upcoming Art Exhibitions in Leading Galleries.