Jörg Immendorff (1945–2007) was one of the enfant terribles of postwar German art, a member of the Neue Wilde (“New Wild Ones”) painting movement and a student of Joseph Beuys, whose career was marked by controversy. Beginning as a radical left-wing thinker and artist, by the 1970s he had turned away from modern European political ideologies and embraced Maoism.
His oeuvre is characterized by large, multi-year painting cycles; the best known among them is Café Deutschland (1977–1984), a series of 16 monumental canvases. In these works, Immendorff creates a densely packed, vividly colored pictorial world to narrate his vision of East–West confrontation, Germany’s historical turning points, and the entanglement of ideology and politics.
The painting The Gate belongs to this series, its first sketches dating back to 1977. Over the years Immendorff reworked the theme across various media and genres, including the version now in Budapest. At the center of the Gate works lies the recurrent motif of the Brandenburg Gate, the symbolic monument of German statehood: its roughly rendered pediment is capped with a snow-covered slab (an allusion to the frozen atmosphere of the Cold War), while its pillars and friezes are populated by heraldic emblems and politicians’ portraits.
Blending satire with self-critique, Immendorff also confronted his own role as an artist. Alongside references to economics and art, the painting evokes the futile struggle for social justice. A sculptural version of the work (Brandenburger Tor, Aachen) translates these global concerns into monumental spatial form. The Gate thus brings together layers of meaning—from global politics and historical memory to personal identity.
