Visual Arts in Germany: Exhibitions and Artist Portraits

The time is ripe

One reason Kippenberger is in such demand lately is that he would have turned 50 this year. The artist died in Vienna in 1997 at the age of 44. For another thing, the time is ripe for Martin Kippenberger. His “way to be” is right in tune with our present age – in which, for instance, a pop singer’s appearance on a TV show triggers an ongoing nation-wide discussion of her panties.

Actually, in 1988 Kippenberger stripped to his briefs for his public, too: in a series of life-size oil paintings, in which he wears oversized white underwear enveloping his flaccid, overweight body. These self-portraits anticipate the ruthless public invasion of personal intimacy in recent years, whilst also doing their part to debunk the myth of artistic genius in the 20th century. In his later days Picasso had himself photographed in a similar undergarment posing self-assuredly in a bathrobe with a fashionable dog by his side.

Question everything

The unrestricted access that Kippenberger allowed to his intimate self is most amenable to present-day media requirements, and it is the vital essence of many of the works he created in the 1980s and ’90s after the death throes of the major avant-garde movements. Whether as “Spiderman” (installation, 1996) or castaway (“Medusa”, oil on canvas, 1996, after Géricault’s “Raft of the Medusa”), Kippenberger casts doubt on virtually all the stuff that art is made of: painting itself, the authenticity of pictures, the role of the artist, the art business. And yet he always remains in the thick of it, zealously painting, a permanent fixture of the German art scene, to which he contributed exhibition and poster titles like “Good degeneration knows no excuses”.

The show in Karlsruhe

Taken in their entirety, the 500-plus exhibits in the Karlsruhe retrospective convey the radical nature of Kippenberger’s “demontages”. The entire ground floor of the Museum für Neue Kunst was cleared out for the show to make room for his large, meticulously staged installations, including the reconstructed 1991 ensemble “Tiefes Kehlchen” (“Deep Little Throat”), sculptures like the seven-part “Hunger Family” (1985), architectural models and models of the Kippenberger metro stations, as well as all the main series of pictures including the photographs of streetlamps he took during the last year of his life.

The figurative paintings in particular give a sense of the negation and the aspirations Kippenberger brought to his metier. The grey-toned series “Uno di voi, un tedesco in Firenze”, which he painted rapidly in 1976 in Florence after having dropped out of art school in Hamburg, had aspirations of a peculiar dimension: the pictures, if stacked on top of one another, were supposed to measure 189 cm, Kippenberger’s height. 10 centimetres before attaining his stature, Kippenberger decided to return to Germany.

Return to the canon

In his realistic series Lieber Maler, male mir (“Painter, paint me a . . .”) of 1981 he fleshed out his disdain for the pretensions of traditional art and hired a professional poster painter to paint for him according to precise instructions and photographic models. For what is the role of a painter in an age in which pictures have become endlessly reproducible and available? In which everything there is to paint has already been painted? In 1996 Kippenberger’s answer to that question took the form of a series of portraits entitled “Jacqueline: The Paintings Pablo Couldn’t Paint Anymore”, which quotes elements of Picasso’s paintings and, as it were, carries on Picasso’s oeuvre after his death. The oft-recurring return to tradition may well lie behind the joke about geniuses being interchangeable.

Martin Kippenberger’s apocalyptic sarcasm proved hard to digest for the art world, where the reception of art begins with curators, art historians and critics. How to approach Kippenberger’s humour, which turns deadly serious upon analysis from any angle? How to present his works in a museum, and what will be left of them then? And how to bring viewers, further and further away in time, closer to the man, Martin Kippenberger, so as not to mummify his work? These are hard nuts to crack for half of those who deal with the works of Martin Kippenberger.

The great sceptic as role-model

The other half couldn’t care less. A blithe young generation of figurative painters like Sophie von Hellermann has discovered in Kippenberger a champion of the refusal to endorse artistic virtuosity – because it does not determine the value of a picture –, and they take a provocative and care-free approach to painting. The great doubter serving as a role-model for a new painting boom: that’s a paradoxical irony Martin Kippenberger would have appreciated.