Lüpertz was born in Reichenberg in the Reichsgau Sudetenland of Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia (now Liberec in the Czech Republic) in 1941. His family moved to Rheydt in the Rhineland, in West Germany, when he was seven years old, in 1948. He was dismissed for an alleged lack of talent from an early apprenticeship as a painter of wine bottle labels. His second teacher, a commercial artist, went bankrupt. Lüpertz studied at the Werkkunstschule of Krefeld, from 1956 to 1961, with Laurens Goosens. his studies, he worked also in mining underground, road construction, and spent a semester at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. His short presence at the Academy ended as a "huge fiasco", and a "physical conflict that escalated a lot" led to his exmatriculation. "As an unloved, as an outcast, I have been expelled from this house," Lüpertz remembered in retrospect, this "embarrassing defeat" of his student days.
Since 1961 he worked in Düsseldorf as a freelance artist. Lüpertz first sought the adventure and joined the French Foreign Legion, but he deserted shortly after, before he could be sent to Algeria. In 1962, he moved to West Berlin, avoiding military service, where he began his actual painting career. There he was one of the founders, together with Karl Horst Hödicke, Hans-Jürgen Diehl, Wolfgang Petrick, Peter Sorge and eleven other artists, of the gallery Grossgörschen, in 1964. In 1969, Kalus Gallwitz, director of the Baden-Baden Kunsthalle, presented works by Lüpertz in his talent show. In 1970, Lüpertz received the Villa Romana Prize and spent a year in Florence, Italy, as part of the associated scholarship. He was awarded the German Association of Critics Prize in 1974. Lüpertz organized the same year the 1st Biennale of Berlin. In 1975, he published his first poetry book, 9 × 9.
After working as a guest lecturer in 1973, he accepted the professorship of painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe in 1974. He published the poetry collection "And I, I play ..." in 1981. In 1983 he took over a professorship at the Summer Academy in Salzburg, Austria. He spent a time in the United States in 1984. He remained a professor in Karlsruhe until 1986.

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