ART-TRIBUTE:Martin Kippenberger-BITTESCHÖN DANKESCHÖN
Martin Kippenberger is one of the most important German artists. He decisively shaped the image of art in the postmodern era. His wit, his unrestrained creative urge, and the resulting work assured him a prominent position within the contemporary art scene during his lifetime. He now occupies an important place in art historical consideration today.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Bundeskunsthalle Archive
Martin Kippenberger’s attitude and understanding of his role as an artist has become a model for future generations. Drawings, posters, collages, multiples, artist’s books, photographs, music, paintings, sculptures, and expansive installations-Kippenberger’s work encompasses all media of 20th Century art. “Martin Kippenberger: BITTESCHÖN DANKESCHÖN” is a major retrospective of the work of Martin Kippenberger at Bundeskunsthalle the Art and Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany. One of the most significant and influential artists of our time, Kippenberger produced a complex and richly prolific body of work from the mid-1970s until his untimely death in 1997 at the age of 44. This large-scale exhibition includes paintings, sculptures, installations, multiples, drawings, photographs, posters, announcement cards, and books, offering a comprehensive examination of the artist’s expansive 20-year career. Kippenberger’s life and work were inextricably linked in an exceptional practice that centered on the role of the artist in the culture and within the system of art. With references, subjects, and sources as wide-ranging and diverse as his production, his work examined and expanded upon that role as he also cast himself as impresario, entertainer, curator, collector, architect, and publisher. Kippenberger drew from popular culture, politics, history, art, architecture, music, and his own life. He was an exceptional appropriator—transforming and challenging his subjects with incisive criticism, self-deprecating humor and formal invention. Martin Kippenberger was born, in 1953, in Dortmund, Germany to upper-middle-class parents. It became apparent from an early age that Kippenberger would become heir to his father’s passion. Soon he was copying paintings from his father’s collection by the likes of Picasso, Klee, Chagall. In 1956 the family had moved to Essen where Kippenberger attended the Frillendorf Protestant State Primary School. There he assumed the mantle of the class clownbefore he moved to the Tetenshof boarding school in Hinterzarten in 1962. He would thrive at Tetenshof under the mentorship of Hans Groh who encouraged Kippenberger’s artistic inclinations. Kippenberger graduated from Tetenshof in 1965 and moved to Honneroth, a boarding school near Altenkirchen in the Westerwald. Already something of a free-spirit, Kippenberger did not take at all to the strict regime at Altenkirchen, referring to it in fact as a “horror school”. He later moved to a private high school in Essen, but, after failing his final exams three times, he left school without graduating. While at high school Kippenberger had found a means of personal expression when he attended classes at Aenne Blomecke’s dance school. As he moved into late adolescence Kippenberger would turn heads at Essen’s Youth Cultural Centre thorough a unique personal style that combined long hennaed hair, bright orange overalls and varnished red toenails. The local Bohmer shoe store rejected his job application as a window dresser, but he managed to secure paid employment as a decorator at the Boecker clothes store in 1970. However, Kippenberger soon found himself hospitalized following an accidental drug overdose. By way of recovery, he travelled aimlessly around Norway and Sweden before returning to Essen in 1971. Shortly after his homecoming, Kippenberger held his first exhibition (with two friends, Birgit and Willi) at the Podium, Essen’s local jazz bar. The exhibition received a positive review in the local. In 1972, Kippenberger secured a place at the Hamburg Art Academy. He studied under multi-media artist Sigmar Polke who had encouraged his students to turn their lives into art by “throwing one’s physical, bodily existence onto the scales” even if it that came “at the price of destroying ourselves”. Kippenberger’s life had started to turn around – he began to build an impressive portfolio (including a photographic series of “drunk people” and finely detailed drawn portraits of friends and family) and he was enjoying his first serious relationship with girlfriend, Inka Hocke – when, in 1976, his mother was killed in a freak car accident. Helena’s death was a devastating shock for the artist who, also having received a substantial inheritance, embarked on a journey of personal re-evaluation. Disenchanted with his art education, Kippenberger left the Hamburg Academy, and travelled to Florence with the goal of becoming an actor. When this plan failed to come to fruition, he turned once more to art, commencing work on his first major series of paintings, “Uno Di Voi, un Tedesco in Firenze” (One of You, a German in Florence), a somewhat sardonic examination of his experiences of Florence as a tourist. The collection of ‘postcard’ images, which recalled the serial style of Kippenberger’s compatriot, Gerhard Richter, were included in Kippenberger’s first solo exhibition in Germany in 1977. By 1978 Kippenberger had relocated to Berlin, where he bought a share in the S.O.36 hall, a renowned Dada-esque/punk performance and film venue. Performers at S.O.36 included David Bowie, Iggy Pop and Grugas, a punk band of which Kippenberger was a band member (with Christine Hahn and Eric Mitchell). In the same year he founded Buro Kippenberger with his friend and ‘business director’ (and later his agent and dealer) Gisela Capitain. Buro Kippenberger was an arts workshop conceived of in the mould of Andy Warhol’s factory and it was here that he staged the group exhibition “Misery”. The exhibition featuring work by Buttner, Achim Duchow, Walter Dahn and George Herold and attracted the interest of the gallerist Max Hetzler who became Kipppenberger’s patron. In 1980, having been being badly beaten by a gang outside S.O.36, he moved to Paris where he tried his hand as a writer. Kippenberger managed to publish the basis for his catalogue “Through Puberty to Success” (in 1981) but he did not stay in Paris for long, preferring to settle this time in Cologne. It was a fruitful period for Kippenberger and he worked on a number of collaborative sculptures, including “Capri by Night”, “Orgone Box by Night” and “Fiaker Race”, with Albert Oehlen. The heavy-drinking Kippenberger had gained a reputation as the enfant terrible of German art and his confrontational and uncompromising personality would often cause offence. In 1986, for instance, Kippenberger, riding high the success of his first large scale museum exhibition, “Rent Electricity Gas”, at the Hessisches Landesmuseum in Darmstadt, bought a gas station in Brazil and named it “The Martin Bormann Gas Station” after the notorious Nazi official who had allegedly escaped to South America. The stunt backfired, however, leaving the artist facing accusations of being a Nazi sympathiser. Meanwhile, Kippenberger’s friendship with Albert Oehlen continued to thrive into the late 1980s, with the two spending time together in Seville and Madrid. Oehlen began to explore abstraction in his paintings while Kippenberger worked on his well-known cycle of self-portraits wearing just his underwear with reference to the famous semi-nude photographs of an ageing Picasso. 1989 marked a significant turning point in Kippenberger’s life. His partner Gabi Hirsch gave birth to their daughter Helena. Kippenberger was a doting parent, but after two years of fatherhood, he found the day-to-day structures of family life stifling and duly sought a means of escape. Additionally, the start of the 1990’s was witness to a number of published articles criticizing Kippenberger for his scabrous lifestyle. By the end of 1991, and worn down by the public criticism, Kippenberger and his family moved to Los Angeles. However, and despite admiration and endorsements from many artists (including Mike Kelley, John Caldwell and Cady Noland), Kippenberger struggled to find success with commercial galleries in America and after only a year he had returned to Germany. He moved to Frankfurt (where he worked as a guest professor at the Stadelschule. Teaching work would sustain him into the early 1990s, working at the Comprehensive University of Kassel and as a guest lecturer at Yale University. Between 1993-95 he established the Kippenberger Art Society in Kassel where he was able to pursue his interest in curatorship. Meanwhile, Kippenberger had garnered positive notices following exhibitions at the Pompidou Center in Paris in 1993 and the Boymans-van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam in 1994. Soon thereafter he founded the experimental and irreverent anti-monument project, the Museum of Modern Art Syros (MOMAS), in an abandoned relic on the Greek island (Syros). Kippenberger married the Austrian photographer Elfie Semotan in 1996. That year also saw the release of a compilation of his music projects, “Greatest Hits: 17 Years of Martin Kippenberger’s Music”. In what was to be the last year of his life, Kippenberger also received the Käthe Kollwitz Prize from the Academy of Arts, Berlin and he was the subject of two major exhibitions: “Respektive 1997-1976”, at the Musee d’art modern et contemporain (MAMCO) in Geneva, and “The Eggman and his Outriggers” at the Stadtisches Museum Abteiberg, Monchengladbach. Kippenberger died of liver cancer on the 7th March 1997 at the University of Vienna Hospital aged just 43, and just weeks before he was to feature in the Documenta X exhibition in Kassel, Germany.
Info: Curator: Susanne Kleine, Bundeskunsthalle -The Art and Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany, Museumsmeile Bonn, Friedrich-Ebert-Allee 4, Bonn, Duration: 1/11/19-6/2/20, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed 10:00-21:00, Thu-Sun 10:00-19:00, www.bundeskunsthalle.de
