Art Calendar – Current Exhibitions in Germany

This year Martin Kippenberger would have been sixty. He died of liver cancer in 1997, after a life of excess. In honour of the all-round artist, who since the late 1970s was feared as a dismantler of traditional concepts of art, the Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum for Contemporary Art in Berlin, has organised an exhibition that makes no less a claim than to display the full range of Kippenberger’s artistic productions.

Ironic and mischievous, Kippenberger was always breathing down the neck of the elitist art world and the cliché of the artist-genius. Thus in 1981 he painted not a single stroke himself for the series Lieber Maler male mir (Dear Painter, Paint for Me) and instead ordered the pictures from a film poster painter. In Berlin, where the Dortmund-born artist lived from 1978 to 1981, he swapped on the spur of the moment his series of oil paintings Uno di voi, un tedesco in Firenze for free food and drink at the Paris Bar.

In addition to painting and sculpture, Kippenberger passionately devoted himself to graphics – he designed about 140 posters – and writing: many works sprung from his pen, including the Formel-1-Poem (“Heute denken morgen fertig”) (i.e., Formula 1 Poem [Think today, ready tomorrow]) and the volume 241 Bildtitel zum Ausleihen für Künstler (i.e., 241 Picture Tittles to Borrow for Artists). Kippenberger gave himself the final grade in his so-called weißen Bildern (1991) (white Pictures): “sehr gut | very good”.