[3] His father, Max Madlener, was a surgeon and disciple of Ferdinand Sauerbruch with whom he worked at the Charité Hospital in Berlin.
[4] Afternoons he was auditor at lectures and seminars by Theodor Adorno[5] and Max Horkheimer at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt.
[7] Jörg Madlener's first solo exhibition in 1965 at the Galerie Le Creuset in Brussels[8] displayed a group of paintings, which were strongly influenced by the work of German painter Max Beckmann.
[9] 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,[10] Jackson Pollock.
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)[12] and in Worms, Germany.