ABOUT:
Jörg Madlener was born on September 8, 1939 in Düsseldorf, Germany. His father, Max Madlener, was a surgeon and disciple of Ferdinand Sauerbruch with whom he worked at the Charité Hospital in Berlin. His mother, Hildegard Pape, was an interior designer. After receiving his undergraduate diploma in architecture in Darmstadt, he continued his studies in 1960 at the Städelschule in Frankfurt where he studied under professor Heinz Battke. Afternoons he was an auditor at lectures and seminars by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt. In 1963, he was a private student of Otto Dix in Hemmenhofen at the lake of Constance. Otto Dix taught Jörg Madlener the technique of egg-oil tempera and working with glazing. In 1964, Jörg Madlener moved to Belgium and continued studying art at the Royal Institute of Fine Arts in Antwerp under Jos Hendrickx.

Artist Jörg Madlener incorporates a deeply philosophical aspect into his works. He sees a correlation between commercial art forces and political forces, in particular those that bring about war. The commercial value assigned to an artist’s work determines whether that artist’s legacy ‘lives’ or ‘dies’: a political entity’s power determines whether a neighboring culture ‘lives’ or ‘dies’. Both are ultimately unrelated to any intrinsic value.

The individual artist is buffeted by these forces his entire life. ‘Art is a rope that can raise one to spectacular heights — or else can serve as a hangman’s noose.’ The four artists who Madlener feels most keenly experienced the pernicious effects of commerce and politics and their various combinations, each of whom has received a philosophico/artistic treatment in a series of paintings, are Gustav Mahler, Robert Musil, Paul Celan and Jackson Pollock.