Jörg Madlener
Jörg Madlener (1939 in Düsseldorf, Germany) is a German painter, engraver and stage designer. Early life and education. 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 auditor at lectures and seminars by Theodor Adorno and  Max Horkheimer at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt. In 1963 he was 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. Work. Jörg Madlener's first solo exhibition in 1965 at the Galerie Le Creuset in Brussels displayed a group of paintings, which were strongly influenced by the work of German painter Max Beckmann. Starting in 1975  Madlener's work was bound to large themes that he followed over years, inspired by Robert Musil, Death in Venice (Thomas Mann and Luchino Visconti), Gustav Mahler's The Song of the Earth, Jackson Pollock. Madlener's 32 portraits of Gustav Mahler are made with a wide range of visual vocabulary from a single photograph of the composer Gustav Mahler. His works can be found at museums around the globe including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Albertina in Vienna, the Museum of Modern Art in Brussels and the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlung in Munich. Public and private collections  in Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland, the Netherlands, France, Spain, Italy, Germany, the United States and the United Arab Emirates own his paintings. In 2019 and 2020, his recent works about the Civil War in Syria and other war-related series will be shown at the former Royal Stables (now belonging to Royal Academies for Science and the Arts of Belgium) in Brussels, at the Energy Park Saerbeck, Germany (in a remodeled bunker of the Cold War) and in Worms, Germany. Stage design. Jörg Madlener worked with many world-renowned theatre stages as a stage and set designer. He worked on following  plays: Exhibitions. Notable solo exhibitions include Madlener participated in several international biennales