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Lot Essay
Martin Kippenberger’s Mirror for Hang-Over Bud (1990) glimmers and gleams, reflecting back at the viewer with a soft, silvery shine that transforms light into a mellow haziness – a helpful insulation from the reality of the morning after the night before. Realised in blurry aluminium foil rather than glass, the work offers a warm, Impressionistic play of lights across its surface, as more defined forms melt into indistinctness. Ringed by a bent lamppost, complete with gas lamp cast in resin, the mirror is a triumph of ingenious surrealist design, its odd bricolage of objects and oval form supplying it with an eccentric retro charm.
As the title suggests this is also a work fundamentally concerned with alcohol, examining the nature of drinking with a sophisticatedly self-referential conceptualism. With its surface of aluminium foil, the gently fuzzed forms it reflects seem to imitate the foggy vision of the drinker, while introducing the somewhat darker sense that identity and definition are beginning to become lost in the alcoholic’s reflection. Indeed, this sense of identity is an extremely important aspect of Mirror for Hang-Over Bud: the work functions not only as a consideration of the nature of drinking and alcoholism in themselves, but also as an examination of the tragicomic way in which Kippenberger’s own art and artistic persona had previously dealt with the issue. Kippenberger’s drinking was legendary, and would eventually prove to be his demise, but he exploited his hedonistic reputation by turning it into a major aspect of his artistic persona – both in his outrageous behaviour at gallery openings and in his artwork; the bent lamppost that frames Mirror for Hang-Over Bud, for example, was already a common motif in Kippenberger’s work, exemplified by the artist’s 1988 sculpture Street Lamp for Drunks, a similarly wonky lamppost that also sought to comically recreate reality according to a twisted drunken logic. However, Kippenberger also played up the sadness of drink, painting several searching self-portraits in which he appears drunken and dishevelled or naked and beer-bellied – and here too, Kippenberger’s blurred vision of the drunkard’s experience is both surreally funny and yet permeated with melancholy, the larger-than-life persona perhaps beginning to obscure and erase the person behind it.
As the title suggests this is also a work fundamentally concerned with alcohol, examining the nature of drinking with a sophisticatedly self-referential conceptualism. With its surface of aluminium foil, the gently fuzzed forms it reflects seem to imitate the foggy vision of the drinker, while introducing the somewhat darker sense that identity and definition are beginning to become lost in the alcoholic’s reflection. Indeed, this sense of identity is an extremely important aspect of Mirror for Hang-Over Bud: the work functions not only as a consideration of the nature of drinking and alcoholism in themselves, but also as an examination of the tragicomic way in which Kippenberger’s own art and artistic persona had previously dealt with the issue. Kippenberger’s drinking was legendary, and would eventually prove to be his demise, but he exploited his hedonistic reputation by turning it into a major aspect of his artistic persona – both in his outrageous behaviour at gallery openings and in his artwork; the bent lamppost that frames Mirror for Hang-Over Bud, for example, was already a common motif in Kippenberger’s work, exemplified by the artist’s 1988 sculpture Street Lamp for Drunks, a similarly wonky lamppost that also sought to comically recreate reality according to a twisted drunken logic. However, Kippenberger also played up the sadness of drink, painting several searching self-portraits in which he appears drunken and dishevelled or naked and beer-bellied – and here too, Kippenberger’s blurred vision of the drunkard’s experience is both surreally funny and yet permeated with melancholy, the larger-than-life persona perhaps beginning to obscure and erase the person behind it.