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Lot Essay
A vivid large-scale work from the artist’s penultimate great cycle of self-portraits, Untitled (from the series “Hand-Painted Pictures”) (1992) captures the complex blend of drama, humor and pathos that defined Martin Kippenberger’s practice. Kippenberger depicts himself standing on a chair, twisting sideways to look into a mirror of reflective silver paint. The backdrop’s concrete grays shade into a glowing chartreuse green, in acid contrast to his tight pink cycling shirt. His legs are sparsely outlined and diminished in scale; his left hand, which holds a lit cigarette, is cartoonishly enlarged. Tucked under his right arm is an enormous foam-rubber footprint lifted from his 1990 sculpture Mecca: Backward Forward. One half of the foot has taken on the shape of an egg: a central motif in the Hand Painted Pictures, and across Kippenberger’s wider practice. This hybrid object and his body appear by turns transparent and solid, in a confusion of spatial relations. Written across the picture, Greek script reads Κεινερ Ηιλφτ Κεινεμ, a phonetic rendering of the German phrase Keiner hilft Keinem, or “Nobody helps anybody”. This was the motto of the Lord Jim Lodge, a self-styled secret society founded by Kippenberger along with several artist friends. With its pile-up of self-referential symbolism and bold figuration, the painting exemplifies the playful, fast-moving and metamorphic nature of Kippenberger’s Gesamtkunstwerk—the totalizing theatrical system that was his art and life—which saw a vast assembly of works, series and social relationships constantly repurposed, reprocessed and interconnected. At the same time, the work displays the vein of keen introspection that ran through Kippenberger’s performative persona. Precariously balanced among the trappings of his vast creative output, the artist tries to catch his own reflection, and seems on the verge of disappearing from view.
Kippenberger made the Hand Painted Pictures in 1992 on a trip to the Greek island of Syros, where he stayed with his friend Michael Würthle. He based them on a group of photographs taken around three years earlier in which he posed with part-finished paintings, sculptures and furnishings in another studio in Venice, Los Angeles. Topless or in his pink cycling outfit, he flexed and contorted his decidedly non-athletic physique—the result of the hard-drinking lifestyle that would eventually lead to his death, aged forty-four, in 1997—in attitudes of simultaneous self-mockery and bravura. These unflattering self-depictions echoed Kippenberger’s previous series of self-portraits, painted on a 1988 trip to Spain with Albert Oehlen, which pictured the artist as an overweight alcoholic in his underwear, burlesquing the image of Picasso as the genius-king of painting. Like those works, the Hand Painted Pictures were painted by Kippenberger himself. Departing from his recent habit of delegating entire bodies of work to assistants, they were also a deliberate counterpoint to his first series of self-portraits, Lieber Maler, male mir (Dear Painter, Paint for Me) (1981), which had been produced by a commercial airbrush painter. The Hand Painted Pictures turn away from these more conceptual explorations of authorship and artistic myth-making towards a hands-on self-scrutiny. His final series of self-portraits, painted in 1996, would go further to perform a sort of self-dissolution: aping Théodore Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa (1818-19), they saw the artist sinking melodramatically into a sea of his own making, or enmeshed in a many-headed, self-cannibalizing confusion of captain, crew, raft and ocean.
The critic Diedrich Diederichsen has characterized Kippenberger as a Selbstdarsteller: literally a “self-performer”. He took on myriad different guises throughout his career, traveling incessantly and constantly exploring new avenues of production. In 1976, with a large inheritance following the death of his mother, he set off to Florence in a fruitless search for acting work. He moved to Berlin in 1978, where he managed the post-punk nightclub SO36. In 1980, he attempted to write a novel while based in Paris. The Liebe Maler, male mir paintings were created in Berlin the following year. Moving soon afterwards to Cologne, he became the charismatic center of the hard-partying, boisterous and iconoclastic scene that surrounded Max Hetzler’s gallery, which opened there in 1983. Alongside his friends Werner Büttner and Albert Oehlen, Kippenberger blossomed in this performative milieu. He and Oehlen, in particular, collaborated on countless musical and artistic projects, traveling together to Brazil and Spain and spurring each other on in creation and debauchery alike. The dialogue with Oehlen was particularly important for both Kippenberger’s 1988 and 1992 self-portraits: the oversized hand in the present work is a telling detail. “The hands were a theme that we competed about”, Oehlen remembers of the series. “I once mentioned to him 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 T. Groetz, “Pop, Irony and Seriousness”, in Kippenberger: Pinturas = Paintings = Gemälde, exh. cat. Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofíá, Madrid 2004, p. 67).
By the late 1980s, Kippenberger’s fame as an enfant terrible had peaked, and he was concerned that his clownish “self-performance” was becoming routine. He started to explore new painterly directions with the Fred the Frog series, which not only featured the artist as the titular crucified amphibian—a pariah, martyr to public opinion and to his own methods—but also made frequent use of the egg motif that would go on to appear in the Hand Painted Pictures. In the present work, the artist’s exaggerated pose—cramped and paranoid among his own creations, the silver mirror returning a blank—seems to picture him caught between roles, and on the lookout for his next move. The egg emerging from beneath his arm perhaps represents a way forward. “In painting you have to be on the lookout: what windfall is still left for you to paint”, Kippenberger said. “Justice hasn’t been done to the egg, justice hasn’t been done to the fried egg, Warhol’s already had the banana ... An egg is white and flat, how can that turn into a colored picture? If you turn it around this way and that, you’ll come up with something. Maybe even social politics, or jokes; whatever the case it’s a beautiful form, just like a woman’s breasts have a beautiful form” (M. Kippenberger, quoted in “Parachever Picasso/Completing Picasso: Interview between Martin Kippenberger and Daniel Baumann”, 1997, in Martin Kippenberger, exh. cat. Tate Modern, London 2006, p. 63). A generative counterpart to the fragile, deflating balloons that had dominated his bleak 1988 self-portraits, the egg is an icon of open-ended and protean potential, embodying the circular, cyclical and self-reproducing nature of Kippenberger’s practice.
Martin Kippenberger, Untitled, 1988. Artwork: © Estate of Martin Kippenberger, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne.
Even the picture’s furnishings link to other aspects of Kippenberger’s work. The chair he stands on, with its distinctive blue-starred seat, would later find its way into his sculptural magnum opus The Happy End of Franz Kafka’s “Amerika” (1994), a large arena of unmatched desks and chairs arranged on a green sports ground. (The installation also featured a foot-shaped table, in the same silhouette that Kippenberger holds under his arm.) Based on the final scene of Kafka’s unfinished 1927 novel, which ends with the protagonist applying for work in response to the advertisement “Whoever wants to be an artist should sign up”, each wildly disparate desk/chair combination signified a job interview—the scene of an imagined performance by each job applicant or artist. Taking this simple premise to a surreal, vast and endlessly variegated conclusion, the installation exemplified Kippenberger’s capacity to forever reinvent the same subject from new perspectives. Items of furniture were of special importance for the artist in this regard, with their manifold designs apt to be rearranged, repurposed and understood anew in different cultural and aesthetic contexts. In this self-portrait, appropriately, the chair with the blue star becomes a stage.
With his inclusion of the Lord Jim Lodge’s motto Keiner hilft Keinem, Kippenberger offers another way into the work. Founded by Kippenberger, Oehlen, Jörg Schlick and Wolfgang Bauer in the mid-1980s in the Paris Bar in Berlin—one of Kippenberger’s favored haunts, and not coincidentally owned by Michael Würthle, who would later be his host in Syros—this quixotic society aimed to make its Sonne Busen Hammer emblem, which combined the sun, a pair of breasts, and a hammer, more famous than the Coca-Cola logo. The symbol would appear and reappear in many of these artists’ works, in a madcap branding exercise with no purpose other than its own proliferation. In the same derisive spirit, rather than revealing any answer or hidden meaning, the present work’s Greek text outright refuses to help. In some ways “Nobody helps anybody” is an ironic in-joke—Kippenberger’s practice depended not only on his own labor but on a busy and ever-expanding network of friends, collaborators, assistants and critics. It also points, however, to the real helplessness of a viewer faced with the task of truly understanding the artist himself. In his all-out conflation of the mechanisms of art and life, Kippenberger was forever caught between harsh self-revelation and the artifice of performance. Here, we see a man at once consumed by his art and the only constant holding it together: he cuts both a ridiculous and noble figure, brilliant, vulnerable, and paradoxically elusive.
Kippenberger made the Hand Painted Pictures in 1992 on a trip to the Greek island of Syros, where he stayed with his friend Michael Würthle. He based them on a group of photographs taken around three years earlier in which he posed with part-finished paintings, sculptures and furnishings in another studio in Venice, Los Angeles. Topless or in his pink cycling outfit, he flexed and contorted his decidedly non-athletic physique—the result of the hard-drinking lifestyle that would eventually lead to his death, aged forty-four, in 1997—in attitudes of simultaneous self-mockery and bravura. These unflattering self-depictions echoed Kippenberger’s previous series of self-portraits, painted on a 1988 trip to Spain with Albert Oehlen, which pictured the artist as an overweight alcoholic in his underwear, burlesquing the image of Picasso as the genius-king of painting. Like those works, the Hand Painted Pictures were painted by Kippenberger himself. Departing from his recent habit of delegating entire bodies of work to assistants, they were also a deliberate counterpoint to his first series of self-portraits, Lieber Maler, male mir (Dear Painter, Paint for Me) (1981), which had been produced by a commercial airbrush painter. The Hand Painted Pictures turn away from these more conceptual explorations of authorship and artistic myth-making towards a hands-on self-scrutiny. His final series of self-portraits, painted in 1996, would go further to perform a sort of self-dissolution: aping Théodore Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa (1818-19), they saw the artist sinking melodramatically into a sea of his own making, or enmeshed in a many-headed, self-cannibalizing confusion of captain, crew, raft and ocean.
The critic Diedrich Diederichsen has characterized Kippenberger as a Selbstdarsteller: literally a “self-performer”. He took on myriad different guises throughout his career, traveling incessantly and constantly exploring new avenues of production. In 1976, with a large inheritance following the death of his mother, he set off to Florence in a fruitless search for acting work. He moved to Berlin in 1978, where he managed the post-punk nightclub SO36. In 1980, he attempted to write a novel while based in Paris. The Liebe Maler, male mir paintings were created in Berlin the following year. Moving soon afterwards to Cologne, he became the charismatic center of the hard-partying, boisterous and iconoclastic scene that surrounded Max Hetzler’s gallery, which opened there in 1983. Alongside his friends Werner Büttner and Albert Oehlen, Kippenberger blossomed in this performative milieu. He and Oehlen, in particular, collaborated on countless musical and artistic projects, traveling together to Brazil and Spain and spurring each other on in creation and debauchery alike. The dialogue with Oehlen was particularly important for both Kippenberger’s 1988 and 1992 self-portraits: the oversized hand in the present work is a telling detail. “The hands were a theme that we competed about”, Oehlen remembers of the series. “I once mentioned to him 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 T. Groetz, “Pop, Irony and Seriousness”, in Kippenberger: Pinturas = Paintings = Gemälde, exh. cat. Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofíá, Madrid 2004, p. 67).
By the late 1980s, Kippenberger’s fame as an enfant terrible had peaked, and he was concerned that his clownish “self-performance” was becoming routine. He started to explore new painterly directions with the Fred the Frog series, which not only featured the artist as the titular crucified amphibian—a pariah, martyr to public opinion and to his own methods—but also made frequent use of the egg motif that would go on to appear in the Hand Painted Pictures. In the present work, the artist’s exaggerated pose—cramped and paranoid among his own creations, the silver mirror returning a blank—seems to picture him caught between roles, and on the lookout for his next move. The egg emerging from beneath his arm perhaps represents a way forward. “In painting you have to be on the lookout: what windfall is still left for you to paint”, Kippenberger said. “Justice hasn’t been done to the egg, justice hasn’t been done to the fried egg, Warhol’s already had the banana ... An egg is white and flat, how can that turn into a colored picture? If you turn it around this way and that, you’ll come up with something. Maybe even social politics, or jokes; whatever the case it’s a beautiful form, just like a woman’s breasts have a beautiful form” (M. Kippenberger, quoted in “Parachever Picasso/Completing Picasso: Interview between Martin Kippenberger and Daniel Baumann”, 1997, in Martin Kippenberger, exh. cat. Tate Modern, London 2006, p. 63). A generative counterpart to the fragile, deflating balloons that had dominated his bleak 1988 self-portraits, the egg is an icon of open-ended and protean potential, embodying the circular, cyclical and self-reproducing nature of Kippenberger’s practice.
Martin Kippenberger, Untitled, 1988. Artwork: © Estate of Martin Kippenberger, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne.
Even the picture’s furnishings link to other aspects of Kippenberger’s work. The chair he stands on, with its distinctive blue-starred seat, would later find its way into his sculptural magnum opus The Happy End of Franz Kafka’s “Amerika” (1994), a large arena of unmatched desks and chairs arranged on a green sports ground. (The installation also featured a foot-shaped table, in the same silhouette that Kippenberger holds under his arm.) Based on the final scene of Kafka’s unfinished 1927 novel, which ends with the protagonist applying for work in response to the advertisement “Whoever wants to be an artist should sign up”, each wildly disparate desk/chair combination signified a job interview—the scene of an imagined performance by each job applicant or artist. Taking this simple premise to a surreal, vast and endlessly variegated conclusion, the installation exemplified Kippenberger’s capacity to forever reinvent the same subject from new perspectives. Items of furniture were of special importance for the artist in this regard, with their manifold designs apt to be rearranged, repurposed and understood anew in different cultural and aesthetic contexts. In this self-portrait, appropriately, the chair with the blue star becomes a stage.
With his inclusion of the Lord Jim Lodge’s motto Keiner hilft Keinem, Kippenberger offers another way into the work. Founded by Kippenberger, Oehlen, Jörg Schlick and Wolfgang Bauer in the mid-1980s in the Paris Bar in Berlin—one of Kippenberger’s favored haunts, and not coincidentally owned by Michael Würthle, who would later be his host in Syros—this quixotic society aimed to make its Sonne Busen Hammer emblem, which combined the sun, a pair of breasts, and a hammer, more famous than the Coca-Cola logo. The symbol would appear and reappear in many of these artists’ works, in a madcap branding exercise with no purpose other than its own proliferation. In the same derisive spirit, rather than revealing any answer or hidden meaning, the present work’s Greek text outright refuses to help. In some ways “Nobody helps anybody” is an ironic in-joke—Kippenberger’s practice depended not only on his own labor but on a busy and ever-expanding network of friends, collaborators, assistants and critics. It also points, however, to the real helplessness of a viewer faced with the task of truly understanding the artist himself. In his all-out conflation of the mechanisms of art and life, Kippenberger was forever caught between harsh self-revelation and the artifice of performance. Here, we see a man at once consumed by his art and the only constant holding it together: he cuts both a ridiculous and noble figure, brilliant, vulnerable, and paradoxically elusive.