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拍品专文
‘In everything that he did, in the way he painted and in the way he lived, Kippenberger was always ready to take up the challenge of his own environment, so that he might understand it in the end.’ (Eva Meyer-Hermann, ‘After Kippenberger’, Nach Kippenberger, exh. cat., Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna, 2003, p. 19)
This intriguing early painting by Martin Kippenberger combines a punky attitude towards painterly surface with a mysteriously enigmatic iconographic motif, a name that the artist constantly revisited throughout his incredibly productive, interdisciplinary, twenty-year career. Executed in 1983, possibly whilst the unsettled Kippenberger had sojourned briefly in Cologne, roughly-formed geometric shapes sit asymmetrically against an anarchic melee of expressive brushwork. Paint is worked in densely thick lashings, culminating with a centralised inverted triangle containing a riotous heap of glossy horizontal brushstrokes. The word ‘Peter’ is scrawled in loose, loopy handwriting over a pink rectangle. It could be the florid autograph of one of Kippenberger’s many alter-egos, but its size and positioning determines it as the painting’s focal point.
Laced throughout the artist’s career (it notably forms the basis of his 1987 exhibition Peter – die russische Stellung (Peter – The Russian Position)), Kippenberger regularly used the name as an epithetic reference to inanimate objects of curiosity, something akin to ‘thingamajigs’ in a colloquial English lexicon. Furthermore, Kippenberger’s employment of ‘Peter’ as a functional suffix for the everyday, the ordinary and the familiar, also derogated an instantly identifiable, post-conceptualist form of branding. As Diedrich Diederichsen has noted, there was a reductive and critical facet to the recurring signature – ‘it could only be used for things or people that were not sufficiently complex, that could be reduced to an attribute or function. To the extent that someone was a Peter he was reducible – or reduced himself – to a kind of brand’ (D. Diederichsen, quoted in Martin Kippenberger: The Problem Perspective, exh. cat., The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2008, p. 120). This eccentrically idiosyncratic approach to subject matter emblematises Kippenberger’s attempt to engage with, and understand, his constantly-shifting local environments, and Untitled (Peter) is a vital document of this aspiration.
This intriguing early painting by Martin Kippenberger combines a punky attitude towards painterly surface with a mysteriously enigmatic iconographic motif, a name that the artist constantly revisited throughout his incredibly productive, interdisciplinary, twenty-year career. Executed in 1983, possibly whilst the unsettled Kippenberger had sojourned briefly in Cologne, roughly-formed geometric shapes sit asymmetrically against an anarchic melee of expressive brushwork. Paint is worked in densely thick lashings, culminating with a centralised inverted triangle containing a riotous heap of glossy horizontal brushstrokes. The word ‘Peter’ is scrawled in loose, loopy handwriting over a pink rectangle. It could be the florid autograph of one of Kippenberger’s many alter-egos, but its size and positioning determines it as the painting’s focal point.
Laced throughout the artist’s career (it notably forms the basis of his 1987 exhibition Peter – die russische Stellung (Peter – The Russian Position)), Kippenberger regularly used the name as an epithetic reference to inanimate objects of curiosity, something akin to ‘thingamajigs’ in a colloquial English lexicon. Furthermore, Kippenberger’s employment of ‘Peter’ as a functional suffix for the everyday, the ordinary and the familiar, also derogated an instantly identifiable, post-conceptualist form of branding. As Diedrich Diederichsen has noted, there was a reductive and critical facet to the recurring signature – ‘it could only be used for things or people that were not sufficiently complex, that could be reduced to an attribute or function. To the extent that someone was a Peter he was reducible – or reduced himself – to a kind of brand’ (D. Diederichsen, quoted in Martin Kippenberger: The Problem Perspective, exh. cat., The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2008, p. 120). This eccentrically idiosyncratic approach to subject matter emblematises Kippenberger’s attempt to engage with, and understand, his constantly-shifting local environments, and Untitled (Peter) is a vital document of this aspiration.