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Lot Essay
The late 1980s marked a watershed in Kippenberger's artistic production. He had already staked out a wealth of representational styles, pictorial types and media in his work, creating a radical break with the tradition of painting with his intense, rapid production of canvases of deceptively trivial content. His paintings became sites of homage and irony, brazenly juxtaposing wry social commentary with self-created mythology. By constantly repeating, alternating and exchanging visual motifs, he created a visual language that attributed the same importance to all ideas.
Kippenberger's strategy of recycling imagery extends into his works of the 1990s. Each work can be seen in connection to another: images were constantly recycled; one work generated another; different styles were adopted; language was played against image. He began experimenting with latex and rubber to create a new kind of "painting". Rubber created an instant impression of a "second-skin", with its obvious physical and sexual implications. Three-dimensional protrusions underpin a sculptural effect of the material. The surface of the rubber paintings were also embossed with linear renditions of fragments of recycled images and personal signs like the streetlamp, the egg or the Capri car.
Untitled from 1991 pays homage to one of Kippenberger's most enduring and popular motifs: the Ford Capri. He was fascinated by the banality of the Ford Capri. The Capri stands for the everyday life of the Germans, 'The car that expressed affordable consumer longings of the 1970s mass culture in design form - contained Kippenbergers eternal personal dialogue with his own petit-bourgeois (kleinbürgerlich) origins, the Italophilic yearnings of the Wirtschaftswunder years for pasta and Capri, the island that not only gave its name to the sports car but also to a cheap and very popular sherbet by Langnese, a fruit drink, and a hit song of the day.' (Diedrich Diederichsen, 'The poor man's sports car descending a staircase: Kippenberger as sculptor', in Martin Kippenberger - The problem perspective, New York 2009, p.130)
In his paintings Kippenberger is obviously battling with art history, especially the German variety, but his canvases are visually intense and physically and materially alive, establishing their own powerful conceptual orbits.
'A thousand excuses are found all the time to decorate walls. By contrast, there is no sign of intensity any more. Mere waffle! A good artist is defined as follows: he's never old, he's never new, he's good! If you go to an exhibition and can find good and bad pictures by an artist, that's good! But please don't think everything's equally good.' (M. Kippenberger quoted in Kippenberger Paintings, exh. cat, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Cologne 2004, p. 140)
Kippenberger's strategy of recycling imagery extends into his works of the 1990s. Each work can be seen in connection to another: images were constantly recycled; one work generated another; different styles were adopted; language was played against image. He began experimenting with latex and rubber to create a new kind of "painting". Rubber created an instant impression of a "second-skin", with its obvious physical and sexual implications. Three-dimensional protrusions underpin a sculptural effect of the material. The surface of the rubber paintings were also embossed with linear renditions of fragments of recycled images and personal signs like the streetlamp, the egg or the Capri car.
Untitled from 1991 pays homage to one of Kippenberger's most enduring and popular motifs: the Ford Capri. He was fascinated by the banality of the Ford Capri. The Capri stands for the everyday life of the Germans, 'The car that expressed affordable consumer longings of the 1970s mass culture in design form - contained Kippenbergers eternal personal dialogue with his own petit-bourgeois (kleinbürgerlich) origins, the Italophilic yearnings of the Wirtschaftswunder years for pasta and Capri, the island that not only gave its name to the sports car but also to a cheap and very popular sherbet by Langnese, a fruit drink, and a hit song of the day.' (Diedrich Diederichsen, 'The poor man's sports car descending a staircase: Kippenberger as sculptor', in Martin Kippenberger - The problem perspective, New York 2009, p.130)
In his paintings Kippenberger is obviously battling with art history, especially the German variety, but his canvases are visually intense and physically and materially alive, establishing their own powerful conceptual orbits.
'A thousand excuses are found all the time to decorate walls. By contrast, there is no sign of intensity any more. Mere waffle! A good artist is defined as follows: he's never old, he's never new, he's good! If you go to an exhibition and can find good and bad pictures by an artist, that's good! But please don't think everything's equally good.' (M. Kippenberger quoted in Kippenberger Paintings, exh. cat, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Cologne 2004, p. 140)