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Lot Essay
Executed in 1988, Martin Kippenberger's Untitled combines two important themes from the artist's contemporary practice: the selfportrait, in which he adopts the pose made famous by the photograph of Pablo Picasso by David Douglas Duncan in 1962 and sculpture: the empty wardrobe entitled Wittgenstein (1987) belonging to his influential Peter: The Russian Position (1987). Created in the same year as Kippenberger's monumental oil on canvas Untitled (1988), the present work is a careful and prodigious iteration of the painted composition. The lines of the two figures, both depicting Kippenberger himself, are carefully built up to create a sense of contour and contrast; the face of the full-frontal figure establishedwith such fine skills and precision that his gaze and the internal life of the artist become palpable. Washes of burgundy watercolour freely interrupt and intermingle with the pencil drawing, flowing across the surface with gravity.
In Untitled, the artist records on paper not only his 'Picasso habit', but his predilection for the three-dimensional form and its relationship to space. The work was importantly exhibited in the The Happy End of Franz Kafka's 'Amerika' at the Diechtorhallen, Hamburg in 1999; a restaging of the artist's ambitious installation originally held at the Museum Boymans-Van Beuningen, Rotterdam in 1994, which adopted Kafka's unfinished literary fiction, Amerika (1914) and translated it into a sporadic collection of sculpture-furniture. In marrying the schematic drawing of a wardrobe, together with the almost tangible, figurative form, Kippenberger was making an important connection between the object and his own body. As Anke Kempkes has noted, 'Kippenberger here presents himself with his new sculpture children, nestles into the Wittgenstein shelf, bends with the facial expression of a conscientious constructor the Peter sculptures here form the heart of the repertoire of the 'End of the Avantgarde', for they are Kippenberger's proposals for a 'postmodern' conception of sculpture. And in actual fact, in his pictures of 1988, Kippenberger places the objects in the sign of the 'balloon', infusing them, ready for take-off' (A. Kempkes, quoted in E. Meyer-Hermann & S. Neuburger (eds.), Nach Kippenberger/After Kippenberger, exh. cat., Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna 2003, p. 117).
In Untitled, the artist records on paper not only his 'Picasso habit', but his predilection for the three-dimensional form and its relationship to space. The work was importantly exhibited in the The Happy End of Franz Kafka's 'Amerika' at the Diechtorhallen, Hamburg in 1999; a restaging of the artist's ambitious installation originally held at the Museum Boymans-Van Beuningen, Rotterdam in 1994, which adopted Kafka's unfinished literary fiction, Amerika (1914) and translated it into a sporadic collection of sculpture-furniture. In marrying the schematic drawing of a wardrobe, together with the almost tangible, figurative form, Kippenberger was making an important connection between the object and his own body. As Anke Kempkes has noted, 'Kippenberger here presents himself with his new sculpture children, nestles into the Wittgenstein shelf, bends with the facial expression of a conscientious constructor the Peter sculptures here form the heart of the repertoire of the 'End of the Avantgarde', for they are Kippenberger's proposals for a 'postmodern' conception of sculpture. And in actual fact, in his pictures of 1988, Kippenberger places the objects in the sign of the 'balloon', infusing them, ready for take-off' (A. Kempkes, quoted in E. Meyer-Hermann & S. Neuburger (eds.), Nach Kippenberger/After Kippenberger, exh. cat., Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna 2003, p. 117).