Martin Kippenberger

Martin Kippenberger (25 February 1953 – 7 March 1997) was a German artist known for his extremely prolific output in a wide range of styles and media, superfiction as well as his provocative, jocular and hard-drinking public persona.

Kippenberger was "widely regarded as one of the most talented German artists of his generation," according to Roberta Smith of the New York Times.

He was at the center of a generation of German enfants terribles including Albert Oehlen, Markus Oehlen, Werner Büttner, Georg Herold, Dieter Göls, and Günther Förg.

Kippenberger was born in Dortmund in 1953, the only boy in a family with five children, with two elder and two younger sisters.

His father was director of the Katharina-Elisabeth colliery, his mother a dermatologist.

When Kippenberger's mother was killed by a pallet falling off a truck, he inherited enough money to live on.

He studied at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg, where Sigmar Polke, despite not teaching him directly, influenced him.

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.

After a sojourn in Florence, where he had his first solo show in 1977, he settled in Berlin in 1978.

In that year he founded Kippenberger's Office with Gisela Capitain, mounting exhibitions of his own art and that of his friends.

During that same period, Kippenberger also became business director of SO36, a performance, film and music space, and started a punk band called the Grugas, which recorded a single called Luxus with Christine Hahn and Eric Mitchell.

Leaving Berlin, originally for a long visit to Paris, Kippenberger spent the early 1980s as an active member of the Cologne art scene.

In Cologne, as elsewhere, Kippenberger did not limit himself to producing works of art; he worked on how the art was presented, the framework and the sideshows.

"Martin was tremendously committed to the gallery's artists," Max Hetzler said.

The Vienna gallerist Peter Pakesch thinks Kippenberger did an enormous amount for the Hetzler Gallery's success in his double role "as clown and strategist... Max without Martin's strategy would have been unimaginable in the early years."

According to artist Jutta Koether, Kippenberger "was the one who brought movement to life so that it became known outside Cologne."

He stayed in Sankt Georgen im Schwarzwald as a guest of the Grässlin family of art collectors from 1980 to 1981, and later on and off from 1991 to 1994, in order to work but also to recover from his excessive life.

In his last years he taught at the Städelschule and the Kassel Art Academy.

Martin Kippenberger died at age 44 from liver cancer at the Vienna General Hospital.

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.

Blass vor Neid steht er vor deiner Tür [Pale with Envy, He Stands Outside Your Door] (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 1984, he became a founding member of the Lord Jim Lodge.

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’.

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 Me, Kippenberger hired a commercial painter named Werner to make them and signed them Werner Kippenberger.

Untitled [The installation of the White Paintings] 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.

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".

After moving to Los Angeles in late 1989, he bought a 35% share in ownership of the Italian restaurant Capri in Venice, Los Angeles.

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.

In 1989, Kippenberger and fellow artist Jeff Koons worked together on an issue of the art journal Parkett; the following year, Koons designed an exhibition poster for Kippenberger.

In 1990, while sojourning 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 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.