Martin Kippenberger - Work

Work

Kippenberger’s refusal to adopt a specific style and medium in which to disseminate his images resulted in an extremely prolific and varied oeuvre which includes an amalgam of sculpture, paintings, works on paper, photographs, installations, prints and ephemera.

Throughout the 1980s, Kippenberger’s artwork underwent periods of strong political reflection. During a trip to Brazil in 1986, Kippenberger bought a gas station by the sea in Salvador de Bahia and renamed it the Martin Bormann Gas Station. With the fictionally acquired gas station, Kippenberger gave Martin Bormann a camouflage address and the possibility of an income in exile; Kippenberger allegedly installed a telephone line and employees were obliged to answer calls with ‘Tankstelle Martin Bormann’. Later accused of neo-Nazi attitudes by German critic Wolfgang Max Faust, he made several life-size, dressed mannequin sculptures of himself, called Martin, ab in die Ecke und schäm Dich (Martin, into the Corner, You Should Be Ashamed of Yourself) (1989), placed facing the wall.

Kippenberger also felt that he was working in the face of a 'perceived death of painting' and his art reflects his struggle with the concept that, at the turn of the millennium, it was impossible to produce anything original or authentic. Blass vor Neid steht er vor deiner Tür (1981), for instance, comprises twenty-one individual canvases shown together as one work, but each canvas has a separate title and there is no consistent style. In 1987 he integrated a 1972, all-gray abstract painting by Gerhard Richter, which he himself had purchased, into the top of a coffee table. For the photorealist paintings from a series titled Lieber Maler, Male Mir or Dear Painter, Paint for Me, Kippenberger hired a commercial painter named Werner to make them and signed them Werner Kippenberger. Untitled make formal reference to debates around language-based conceptual art as a critique of the ‘empty’ white cube gallery space. In a first series of works alluding to Picasso that were to follow in 1988, Kippenberger took this project further, looking to the ultimate Modern icon as a contemporary foil. Restaging a well-known photograph by David Douglas Duncan of Picasso standing in a 'puffed-up' state of undress on the steps of Château Vauvenargues in 1962 Kippenberger was parodying his famous antecedent, playfully subverting the machismo associated with the genre of self-portraiture. First adopted as a motif in his 1988 series of self-portraits undertaken in Carmona, Spain, Kippenberger depicted himself with white briefs pulled up high over his exaggerated belly, as he turned to examine himself in a mirror.

Kippenberger made the first of Laterne (Lamp) sculptures in 1988, a year that he spent largely living in Seville and Madrid in Spain. This work, Laterne an Betrunkene ('Street Lamp for Drunks') has become well known through its exhibition at the 1988 Venice Biennale. The original motif of the lamp sculptures derived in part from the photographs that filled Kippenberger's 1988 artist's book, "Psychobuildings".

In 1990, while sejourning in New York City, Kippenberger started a body of work collectively known as the Latex or Rubber paintings. Also in the 1990s, influenced by the Lost Art Movement, Kippenberger had the idea of an underground network encircling the whole world. Located on the Greek island of Syros and in Dawson City, Canada, false subway entrances are part of a the Metro-Net World Connection series (1993–7) Kippenberger built as private commissions; a sizable length of subway grating, complete with the sounds of trains and gusts of wind, was exhibited posthumously at the Venice Biennale.

The Happy End of Franz Kafka’s ‘Amerika’ (1994) explores the fictional utopia of universal employment, adapting Kafka’s idea of communal job interviews into an artwork. The installation consists of a diverse assortment of objects and furniture, assembled to suggest a playing field for conducting mass interviews. There are over 40 tables and twice as many chairs, from classics of twentieth-century design, such as chairs by Arne Jacobsen and Charles Eames, to worn-out tables bought in flea markets, remnants of previous Kippenberger exhibitions, and even work by other artists.

During the last 10 years of his life Kippenberger created a series of drawings on hotel stationery, which are commonly referred to as the 'hotel drawings' (1987–1997). Originally undertaken as ad hoc preparatory diagrams for the three-dimensional Peter sculptures, he later used the myriad letterheads of innumerable hotels to capture other subjects and inspirations. Collected in his travels, Kippenberger conceived them in thematic series (portraits of scientists, portraits of Frank Sinatra, depictions of war etc.). His late collages incorporate photographs (Polaroids, film stills, magazine clips), prints (one by Sigmar Polke), exhibition posters from past Kippenberger shows, some folded up origami-style, self-produced decals, and photographed and rephotographed drawings. Executed in 1996 as part of the series, Untitled offers a depiction of Kippenberger standing side by side with his daughter Helena as a little girl.

In the final two series, Kippenberger first can be seen posing like Picasso’s last wife, Jacqueline, subtitling the piece The Paintings Pablo Couldn’t Paint Anymore. In the complex of lithographs entitled Medusa (1996), Kippenberger used photography as his starting point although, this time, he himself posed for wife and photographer Elfie Semotan, mimicking the postures of the characters in the famous painting The Raft of the Medusa (1819) by Théodore Géricault (1791-1824).

In 2011, Kippenberger's When It Starts Dripping From the Ceiling was accidentally destroyed by a janitor in a Dortmund museum who believed she was cleaning stains off of the work.