Historical image traditions are examined here as material of the present.

Ancien Régime 2016 documents the joint exhibition of Andreas Mühe and Markus Lüpertz at Kunsthalle Rostock. The publication places two very different artistic approaches in relation to one another: Mühe’s staged photography and Lüpertz’s drawn engagement with art-historical models.

In his photographic works, Andreas Mühe examines the aesthetics of political and historical imagery. In the series Obersalzberg, he focuses on a visual language associated with National Socialism, conveyed through posture, gesture, clothing, perspective, and lighting. His photographs work with staging, distance, and painterly composition, making historical signs visible not as documentary repetition, but as deliberately constructed images.

Markus Lüpertz presents a comprehensive series of 96 drawings dedicated to the Apollo by the Baroque sculptor Ludwig Münstermann. The point of departure is a seventeenth-century wooden figure, now held in the Bode Museum in Berlin and originally part of an organ prospect. Lüpertz translates this figure into a sequence of variations in which antiquity, the Baroque, the image of the body, and art history are brought into relation.

The publication shows how both artists activate, shift, and confront inherited modes of seeing and historical image patterns. Ancien Régime 2016 treats photography and drawing as media of memory, staging, and the critical examination of cultural images of power.