The Lidl-Raum, founded in Düsseldorf in 1968, was one of the first artist-organized spaces in which art and politics were united. It arose under the influence of the May 1968 demonstrations in Paris and the German student movement, but the Lidl actions reached their high point in May 1969 after affiliated artists set up a “Lidl-classroom” in a boarded hut in the corridor of the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. When it was banned and the artists expelled, Joseph Beuys put his classroom at the disposal of the action. For a long time it was said that Jörg Immendorff initiated this noteworthy episode. In

Elke Krystufek’s art gives a contemporary twist to that nineteenth-century notion of the artist as narcissist. Over the past several years she has produced a seemingly endless stream of close-up self-portraits, made by photographing her face, naked body, or torso—always reflected in a mirror—and then copying the images onto canvas in an aggressively expressionist style. Clearly indebted to women’s body art from the ’70s as well as the exhibitionism of the Viennese Actionists, Krystufek also shares affinities with the more confessional art of a contemporary like Tracey Emin, who likewise lays