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Lot Essay
‘I once mentioned to [Kippenberger] that I had heard that one could see from painted hands whether someone could really paint. We were standing in front of one of my self-portraits where the hands were really bad. He wanted to go one better’ (A. Oehlen, quoted in A. Goldstein, ‘The Problem Perspective’, Martin Kippenberger: The Problem Perspective, exh. cat., The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2008, p. 92).
Bathetic and irreverent, Ohne Titel (Aus der Serie Hand-painted pictures) (Untitled (From the Series Hand-Painted Pictures)) belongs to a rare and outstanding group of self-portraits that came to define Martin Kippenberger’s career. Painted in 1992, the Hand-Painted Pictures engage directly with the questions of artistic self-presentation that occupied his oeuvre. Suffused with tones of red and green in richly layered impasto, the artist turns his head, concealed behind a hunched shoulder. His body is transformed into the shape of an egg – the signature motif within Kippenberger’s visual lexicon – whilst his hand surges into the foreground, grasping the air like a claw. The artist imposes himself upon a harlequinesque four-square background that recurs throughout his practice, grounded by a segment of deep, dark paint applied with thick gestural brushstrokes. Anthropomorphism and symbolism abound: the egg, the ubiquitous life-source, combines with hand, the enshrined source of creativity, in a work that simultaneously deifies and condemns the artist. Power, dignity and grandeur are held in profound tension with ignominy and shame. His reclusive stance and transfigured body position him before the viewer as an exposed icon, recalling the Christ-like imagery that populates his oeuvre. Kippenberger’s greatest self-portraits transformed the artistic milieu, destabilizing pre-existing prescriptions for the genre. Throughout his lifetime, he rejoiced in playing up stereotypes of the artist – the artist as drunk, as showman, as jester, as deity – and his self-portraits confront these axioms in the medium of paint. Demythologizing gestures are counteracted with iconographic enigmas; glimpses of humanity are balanced with impenetrable imagery. Anchoring his life and practice, Kippenberger’s self-portraits are held major private and public collections including Annick and Anton Herbert, Christopher Wool and Charline von Heyl, the Flick Collection and Centre Georges Pompidou. ‘Art was not a reflection of his life, it was his life’, Susanne Kippenberger recalled shortly after her brother’s death (S. Kippenberger, ‘Heimweh Highway or: Start Simple Get Home’, in Martin Kippenberger, exh. cat., Tate, London, 2006, p. 53). In the present work, we are invited into this deeply complex, highly eclectic and intensely personal space.
Over the course of a decade, Kippenberger undertook some of his most defining works, producing landmark self-portraits that vivified the genre for a new generation. Painted on the Greek island of Syros, where Kippenberger was to create his Museum of Modern Art the following year, the Hand-Painted Pictures of 1992 follow on from the Lieber Maler, Male Mir (Dear Painter, Paint For Me) series of 1981 and the Picasso paintings of 1988. In the Dear Painter, Paint For Me suite, Kippenberger employed a poster-painter known only as Werner to meticulously reproduce in paint those photographs and private snapshots captured during a trip to New York in 1979. The works from this series - which encompass images of the artist sitting casually on a discarded sofa on a street corner, or leaning up against an East German boundary – represent the beginning of the artist’s investigations and ultimately his deconstruction of the hallowed ‘cult of the artist’. In the Picasso paintings of 1988, Kippenberger took this project further, looking to the ultimate Modern icon as a contemporary foil. Restaging the well-known photograph of Picasso standing in a ‘puffed-up’ state of undress on the steps of Château Vauvenargues in 1962, Kippenberger was parodying his famous antecedent, playfully subverting the machismo associated with the genre of self-portraiture.
The Hand-Painted Pictures that follow represent a new level of investigation into the concept of self-portraiture. Often transforming his own hand into a prominent focal point, as in the present work, Kippenberger delved deeper into notions of artistic authorship, authenticity and identity. In a cheerful anecdote, the artist’s friend Albert Oehlen later recounted: ‘I once mentioned to [Kippenberger] that I had heard that one could see from painted hands whether someone could really paint. We were standing in front of one of my self-portraits where the hands were really bad. He wanted to go one better’ (A. Oehlen, quoted in A. Goldstein, ‘The Problem Perspective’, Martin Kippenberger: The Problem Perspective, exh. cat., The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2008, p. 92). Beyond this friendly competition with his colleague, the hand served a more significant function for Kippenberger, acting as a symbolic marker for artistic creativity. Though his execution is laced with overtones of Expressionist and Neo-Expressionist painting, particularly Oskar Kokoschka’s own delicate depictions of the hand, Kippenberger ultimately presents a roguish parody of these paradigms. Where Expressionist traditions had set great store by the auratic, expressive trace of the artist’s hand, here Kippenberger infuses this notion with irony and witty literalism. His own distorted, deliberately oversized hand looms large, appearing to protrude from the canvas. By obviating its presence, disfigured to proportions both comedic and supernatural, Kippenberger undermines the mystique of the artist’s hand, placing it upon a new conceptual pedestal.
Kippenberger’s transformation of his own body into the shape of an egg is significant as an act of self-portraiture. The symbol of the egg took its place among the frog, the lamp and the chair as one of his most important conceptual linchpins, operating as an altar-ego (the ‘Eggman’), a formal device and a pervasive leitmotif throughout his oeuvre. As a symbol of fertility and life, a religious signifier and a banal food item, the egg was idealized for its ability to invoke both the comedic and the profound. Its form is incorporated into many of the self-portraits, indicating Kippenberger’s intense identification with the object, and was to constitute the sole subject of his final exhibition, The Eggman and his Outriggers, in 1997. In a late interview, the artist described how ‘...the stupidest things suddenly turned into something quite individual. It’s such a comic process. Always get to the heart of the matter, to things that are so close that you wouldn’t think of them. Like an egg, or that sort of thing, and mess about with that ... You don’t have to painstakingly pull things apart, discover something somewhere or other. Some things are never used up because there’s still so much in them’ (M. Kippenberger, interviewed by D. Baumann, ‘Parachever Picasso/Completing Picasso’ in Martin Kippenberger, exh. cat., Tate Modern, London, 2006, p. 65). In the present work, the artist undergoes an act of metamorphosis, his whole body subsumed by the egg, invoking competing images of genetic modification and sublime, quasireligious transmutation. It was his ability to shift between the jocular, the divine and the fantastical within the same context that has defined Kippenberger’s unique approach to art, and indeed to life.
Bathetic and irreverent, Ohne Titel (Aus der Serie Hand-painted pictures) (Untitled (From the Series Hand-Painted Pictures)) belongs to a rare and outstanding group of self-portraits that came to define Martin Kippenberger’s career. Painted in 1992, the Hand-Painted Pictures engage directly with the questions of artistic self-presentation that occupied his oeuvre. Suffused with tones of red and green in richly layered impasto, the artist turns his head, concealed behind a hunched shoulder. His body is transformed into the shape of an egg – the signature motif within Kippenberger’s visual lexicon – whilst his hand surges into the foreground, grasping the air like a claw. The artist imposes himself upon a harlequinesque four-square background that recurs throughout his practice, grounded by a segment of deep, dark paint applied with thick gestural brushstrokes. Anthropomorphism and symbolism abound: the egg, the ubiquitous life-source, combines with hand, the enshrined source of creativity, in a work that simultaneously deifies and condemns the artist. Power, dignity and grandeur are held in profound tension with ignominy and shame. His reclusive stance and transfigured body position him before the viewer as an exposed icon, recalling the Christ-like imagery that populates his oeuvre. Kippenberger’s greatest self-portraits transformed the artistic milieu, destabilizing pre-existing prescriptions for the genre. Throughout his lifetime, he rejoiced in playing up stereotypes of the artist – the artist as drunk, as showman, as jester, as deity – and his self-portraits confront these axioms in the medium of paint. Demythologizing gestures are counteracted with iconographic enigmas; glimpses of humanity are balanced with impenetrable imagery. Anchoring his life and practice, Kippenberger’s self-portraits are held major private and public collections including Annick and Anton Herbert, Christopher Wool and Charline von Heyl, the Flick Collection and Centre Georges Pompidou. ‘Art was not a reflection of his life, it was his life’, Susanne Kippenberger recalled shortly after her brother’s death (S. Kippenberger, ‘Heimweh Highway or: Start Simple Get Home’, in Martin Kippenberger, exh. cat., Tate, London, 2006, p. 53). In the present work, we are invited into this deeply complex, highly eclectic and intensely personal space.
Over the course of a decade, Kippenberger undertook some of his most defining works, producing landmark self-portraits that vivified the genre for a new generation. Painted on the Greek island of Syros, where Kippenberger was to create his Museum of Modern Art the following year, the Hand-Painted Pictures of 1992 follow on from the Lieber Maler, Male Mir (Dear Painter, Paint For Me) series of 1981 and the Picasso paintings of 1988. In the Dear Painter, Paint For Me suite, Kippenberger employed a poster-painter known only as Werner to meticulously reproduce in paint those photographs and private snapshots captured during a trip to New York in 1979. The works from this series - which encompass images of the artist sitting casually on a discarded sofa on a street corner, or leaning up against an East German boundary – represent the beginning of the artist’s investigations and ultimately his deconstruction of the hallowed ‘cult of the artist’. In the Picasso paintings of 1988, Kippenberger took this project further, looking to the ultimate Modern icon as a contemporary foil. Restaging the well-known photograph of Picasso standing in a ‘puffed-up’ state of undress on the steps of Château Vauvenargues in 1962, Kippenberger was parodying his famous antecedent, playfully subverting the machismo associated with the genre of self-portraiture.
The Hand-Painted Pictures that follow represent a new level of investigation into the concept of self-portraiture. Often transforming his own hand into a prominent focal point, as in the present work, Kippenberger delved deeper into notions of artistic authorship, authenticity and identity. In a cheerful anecdote, the artist’s friend Albert Oehlen later recounted: ‘I once mentioned to [Kippenberger] that I had heard that one could see from painted hands whether someone could really paint. We were standing in front of one of my self-portraits where the hands were really bad. He wanted to go one better’ (A. Oehlen, quoted in A. Goldstein, ‘The Problem Perspective’, Martin Kippenberger: The Problem Perspective, exh. cat., The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2008, p. 92). Beyond this friendly competition with his colleague, the hand served a more significant function for Kippenberger, acting as a symbolic marker for artistic creativity. Though his execution is laced with overtones of Expressionist and Neo-Expressionist painting, particularly Oskar Kokoschka’s own delicate depictions of the hand, Kippenberger ultimately presents a roguish parody of these paradigms. Where Expressionist traditions had set great store by the auratic, expressive trace of the artist’s hand, here Kippenberger infuses this notion with irony and witty literalism. His own distorted, deliberately oversized hand looms large, appearing to protrude from the canvas. By obviating its presence, disfigured to proportions both comedic and supernatural, Kippenberger undermines the mystique of the artist’s hand, placing it upon a new conceptual pedestal.
Kippenberger’s transformation of his own body into the shape of an egg is significant as an act of self-portraiture. The symbol of the egg took its place among the frog, the lamp and the chair as one of his most important conceptual linchpins, operating as an altar-ego (the ‘Eggman’), a formal device and a pervasive leitmotif throughout his oeuvre. As a symbol of fertility and life, a religious signifier and a banal food item, the egg was idealized for its ability to invoke both the comedic and the profound. Its form is incorporated into many of the self-portraits, indicating Kippenberger’s intense identification with the object, and was to constitute the sole subject of his final exhibition, The Eggman and his Outriggers, in 1997. In a late interview, the artist described how ‘...the stupidest things suddenly turned into something quite individual. It’s such a comic process. Always get to the heart of the matter, to things that are so close that you wouldn’t think of them. Like an egg, or that sort of thing, and mess about with that ... You don’t have to painstakingly pull things apart, discover something somewhere or other. Some things are never used up because there’s still so much in them’ (M. Kippenberger, interviewed by D. Baumann, ‘Parachever Picasso/Completing Picasso’ in Martin Kippenberger, exh. cat., Tate Modern, London, 2006, p. 65). In the present work, the artist undergoes an act of metamorphosis, his whole body subsumed by the egg, invoking competing images of genetic modification and sublime, quasireligious transmutation. It was his ability to shift between the jocular, the divine and the fantastical within the same context that has defined Kippenberger’s unique approach to art, and indeed to life.