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Lot Essay
‘You can’t stand yourself next to every picture you paint and explain things. Pictures have to talk for themselves. Mostly the pictures you first set store by are not the interesting pictures. It’s the imperfect pictures that go on creating some sort of tension.’
—MARTIN KIPPENBERGER
In Ohne Titel (Aufstand der Frühaufsteher) (Untitled (Insurgence of the Early-Riser)) (1982), Martin Kippenberger uses the idiom of abstraction against itself, both challenging generic assumptions and at once moving beyond parody or satire to convey something more vigorously his own. Against a backdrop of intermingled tones ranging across the palette, Kippenberger applies a cross-hatching of predominantly perpendicular lines, dominated by several large blue strokes spray-painted on to the canvas, daringly juxtaposing colour in a way that treads a line between vibrancy and a deliberate garishness. As pinks, blues, oranges, dark greens and greys collide, the work self-consciously explores abstract idioms with an untrammelled energy and excitement; the immediate impression is of mid-century Abstract Expressionism or Art Informel, updated with the lurid colour schemes deployed by the Neo-Expressionists emerging in Germany at this time, but the work also suggests an engagement with the work of Kippenberger’s contemporary Günther Förg, recalling Förg’s very early watercolour experiments with perpendicular lines and window forms. Kippenberger had met Förg in 1982, the year in which this work was painted, and was an admirer of his work, and indeed in some sense, Kippenberger’s work shares less with expressionism than it does Förg’s aesthetic concerns. Like Förg, Kippenberger questions abstraction’s claims to expression – though where Förg seeks to strip away everything but the formal rudiments of the abstract, Kippenberger jocularly undermines it as a mode by covertly introducing the directly communicative system of verbal language into the painting. As closer inspection of the work reveals, amidst the lines the artist has inscribed the title of the work: ‘AUFSTAND DER FRÜHAUFSTEHER’, or ‘INSURGENCE OF THE EARLY-RISER.’ There is perhaps a political undercurrent here – Helmut Kohl’s conservative government coming to power in West Germany in 1982 – but the meaning of the phrase remains somewhat esoteric. The text is perhaps most important as an example of Kippenberger’s iconoclastic, unrepressed sense of what art is; as Roberto Ohrt has said of his use of language, Kippenberg’s ‘crowded and confused appendix of texts and letters signalled first and foremost that this art functioned according to different laws and codes, and could not be fenced in’ (R. Ohrt, ‘First the Feet,’ in Kippenberger pinturas = paintings = gemalde, exh. cat., Palacio de Velázquez, Parque del Retiro, Madrid, Cologne, 2004). In the case of Aufstand der Frühaufsteher, this seems to be quite literally true – the fence’s structure itself deconstructed in the floating perpendicular lines that both form its open-ended title, and that seem to open out before the viewer onto a world of unrestrained colour.
—MARTIN KIPPENBERGER
In Ohne Titel (Aufstand der Frühaufsteher) (Untitled (Insurgence of the Early-Riser)) (1982), Martin Kippenberger uses the idiom of abstraction against itself, both challenging generic assumptions and at once moving beyond parody or satire to convey something more vigorously his own. Against a backdrop of intermingled tones ranging across the palette, Kippenberger applies a cross-hatching of predominantly perpendicular lines, dominated by several large blue strokes spray-painted on to the canvas, daringly juxtaposing colour in a way that treads a line between vibrancy and a deliberate garishness. As pinks, blues, oranges, dark greens and greys collide, the work self-consciously explores abstract idioms with an untrammelled energy and excitement; the immediate impression is of mid-century Abstract Expressionism or Art Informel, updated with the lurid colour schemes deployed by the Neo-Expressionists emerging in Germany at this time, but the work also suggests an engagement with the work of Kippenberger’s contemporary Günther Förg, recalling Förg’s very early watercolour experiments with perpendicular lines and window forms. Kippenberger had met Förg in 1982, the year in which this work was painted, and was an admirer of his work, and indeed in some sense, Kippenberger’s work shares less with expressionism than it does Förg’s aesthetic concerns. Like Förg, Kippenberger questions abstraction’s claims to expression – though where Förg seeks to strip away everything but the formal rudiments of the abstract, Kippenberger jocularly undermines it as a mode by covertly introducing the directly communicative system of verbal language into the painting. As closer inspection of the work reveals, amidst the lines the artist has inscribed the title of the work: ‘AUFSTAND DER FRÜHAUFSTEHER’, or ‘INSURGENCE OF THE EARLY-RISER.’ There is perhaps a political undercurrent here – Helmut Kohl’s conservative government coming to power in West Germany in 1982 – but the meaning of the phrase remains somewhat esoteric. The text is perhaps most important as an example of Kippenberger’s iconoclastic, unrepressed sense of what art is; as Roberto Ohrt has said of his use of language, Kippenberg’s ‘crowded and confused appendix of texts and letters signalled first and foremost that this art functioned according to different laws and codes, and could not be fenced in’ (R. Ohrt, ‘First the Feet,’ in Kippenberger pinturas = paintings = gemalde, exh. cat., Palacio de Velázquez, Parque del Retiro, Madrid, Cologne, 2004). In the case of Aufstand der Frühaufsteher, this seems to be quite literally true – the fence’s structure itself deconstructed in the floating perpendicular lines that both form its open-ended title, and that seem to open out before the viewer onto a world of unrestrained colour.