Europe

Martin Kippenberger

Untitled

1988

Untitled, 1988

Martin Kippenberger’s late collages are known for incorporating a wide range of materials, from polaroids and magazine clips to hotel stationery, decals, and graphite drawings. Untitled is a collage on paper work by Kippenberger that typifies his everything-goes approach: a barely discernible, sliced image of Michael Jackson’s face is overlaid and woven with strips and triangular shapes from a different source into a single composition. Blue tones come from torn out pages of a book where fragments of illustrations can be seen. Together, all the elements suggest an alternative, highly stylized portrait of the artist; in this case, a fragmented, fluid, and itinerant sense of identity. Consistent with other works by the artist, Untitled defies any specific style and continues Kippenberger’s inquiry into the self and its potential to manifest through the objects and materials that we modify.

Martin Kippenberger is widely regarded as one of the most talented German artists of his generation. Although he was incredibly prolific in a diverse range of media—drawings, collage, sculpture, performance, painting, photography, installations, prints, ephemera.—his best-known works are paintings, many of them self-portraits. Kippenberger was a very polarizing figure, known by many for being a provocateur and for making politically charged work as artworld commentary. Often taking on different art historical tropes, his work tested the boundaries of authorship and originality. He was known to hire others to paint for him under a pseudonym, or use work by other artists to create new work. Examples include restaging a photograph of Pablo Picasso; turning a monochrome by Gerard Richter into a coffee table; and claiming an installation of his as the last chapter of an unfinished novel by Franz Kafka. One of his key concerns was to try to understand the artist’s place in the modern world, and how their essence and personality can become apparent in the objects that they create.

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Martin Kippenberger Untitled

Martin Kippenberger

Untitled