Martin Kippenberger
gigatos | January 11, 2022
Summary
Martin Kippenberger († March 7, 1997 in Vienna) was a German painter, installation artist, performance artist, sculptor and photographer.
Martin Kippenberger grew up in Essen with two older and two younger sisters, including the journalist Susanne Kippenberger. His father was the director of the Katharina colliery, his mother a dermatologist. Kippenberger was a great-great-grandson of Carl Leverkus (1804-1889), who gave his name to the city of Leverkusen, which was founded in 1930. In 1968 he dropped out of school and began an apprenticeship as a decorator, which he was not allowed to finish, however, because of drug use. From 1972 to 1976 he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Hamburg (with Claus Böhmler, Rudolf Hausner and Franz Erhard Walther). He then moved to Florence, where he began the series of paintings “Uno di voi, un tedesco in Firenze”. In 1977 he made the acquaintance of Werner Büttner, Albert and Markus Oehlen. In 1978 therefore followed the move to Berlin. Together with Gisela Capitain, Kippenberger founded “Kippenbergers Büro” in Berlin in 1978, where he showed exhibitions of young artists. At the same time he became managing director of the event hall SO36 – at that time mainly a meeting place of the punk scene. In 1979, he created the well-known 12-part group of works “Lieber Maler, male mir” (Dear painter, paint me), which a poster painter painted based on Kippenberger”s photo templates.
In 1980 followed the move to Paris to become a writer. In 1981 he participated in the group exhibition Rundschau Deutschland. In 1984 he was represented with six works in the exhibition “Deep Views – Art of the Eighties from the Federal Republic of Germany, the GDR, Austria and Switzerland” at the Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt and at the exhibition Von hier aus – Zwei Monate neue deutsche Kunst in Düsseldorf. In the same year he joined the Lord Jim Lodge (its motto: “No one helps anyone”). In 1987 he made his first drawings on hotel stationery. In 1988 he participated in the Venice Biennale. In 1989 his daughter Helena Augusta Eleonore was born. In the same year he moved to Los Angeles.
In 1990 Kippenberger took on a guest professorship at the Städelschule in Frankfurt and from 1992 gave guest lectures at Yale University and at the universities of Nice, Amsterdam and the Gesamthochschule Kassel. In 1992 he participated in the Dokumenta IX in Kassel. In 1996 he received the Käthe Kollwitz Prize. In 1997 he participated in Documenta X in Kassel and in the exhibition Skulptur.Projekte in Münster. In 2003 he was represented posthumously at the 50th Venice Biennale together with Candida Höfer for the German Pavilion.
Kippenberger”s works can be classified as Neue Wilde. In the tradition of Dada and Fluxus, he worked to dismantle the traditional concept of art. His means to this end included provocation, cynicism, and mockery.
In 1986, the Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt showed “Miete – Strom – Gas,” his first solo exhibition. Tate Modern opened the first comprehensive retrospective of Martin Kippenberger”s work in Great Britain on February 8, 2006. Until May 14, a selection of Kippenberger”s prolific oeuvre could be viewed at the London museum, including self-portraits from 1988 and numerous drawings from the hotel stationery series. The exhibition then moved to K21, Düsseldorf.
His 1990 work “First the Feet” – a grass-green frog nailed to the cross with a beer mug and egg in its hands – attracted attention in 2008. Pope Benedict XVI supported the president of the South Tyrol Regional Council, Franz Pahl, with a letter saying that the crucified frog hurt the religious feelings of many people. Pahl went on a hunger strike to have the artwork removed from the Museum of Modern Art in Bolzano. Despite the hunger strike, vigils and letters to the editor, the museum”s director and board of directors confirmed their decision to leave the sculpture in the museum until the regular end of the exhibition.
In 1996 Kippenberger and the photographer Elfie Semotan got married.
Martin Kippenberger died on March 7, 1997 in Vienna as a result of liver cancer.
Ben Becker wrote the song “Kippi or Kippy Song” in honor of Kippenberger.
“I can”t for the life of me detect a swastika”.
The work Ich kann beim besten Willen kein Hakenkreuz entdecken (I can”t discover a swastika) from 1984 thematizes the specifically German identity problem: Kippenberger subversively wants to question and satirize the morals of the Germans, or rather their relationship to their Nazi past.
Also read, history – Great Depression
“Feet first”
The sculpture First the Feet, a Crossed Frog, created in 1990, is a self-ironically reflective self-portrait.
Also read, history – Spice trade
“Metro-Net”
With Metro-Net, Kippenberger planned a worldwide subway system consisting only of dummies of entrances and ventilation shafts, in which occasionally played sounds of travel and air currents generated by fans reinforced the fiction. As the first station of Kippenberger”s Metro-Net, a concrete staircase was built in 1993 on the Greek Cycladic island of Syros. The lower entrance, however, was blocked by a wrought-iron door bearing the signet of the Lord Jim Lodge. A wooden subway exit was added in Dawson in August 1995 and another exit in 1997 at the Leipzig Fairgrounds. Several planned stations were erected posthumously, such as during Documenta X in Kassel and Skulptur.Projekte in Münster in 1997. A Transportable Ventilation Shaft (1997) is in the Grässlin Collection and was exhibited in St. Georgen and Karlsruhe, for example, and a Transportable Subway Entrance (1997) was on display in the Skulpturenpark Köln from 1997 to 1999. In 2003, another Ventilation Shaft was installed in the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, which – six years after the artist”s death – was sometimes discussed as not being true to the work. As early as 2001, an installation Transportable Subway Entrance, completed during Kippenberger”s lifetime in 1997, was erected in the village of Madulain, Switzerland. The logo of the Lord Jim Lodge, “Sonne Busen Hammer,” can be seen on the gate.
Kippenberger”s paintings, installations, and sculptures are in numerous public collections. In the German-speaking countries these are
In addition, his works are also in art collections and museums in Belgium, Denmark, France (Centre Pompidou, Musée d”arts de Nantes, Musée d”art moderne de Saint-Étienne), Iceland, Italy, the Netherlands (Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam), Norway, Spain (Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno (CAAM)), Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, the USA (MoMA – Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC) and in the United Kingdom (The Saatchi Gallery, London, Tate Britain, London, Tate Gallery of Modern Art, London).
An incident at the Museum Ostwall made headlines in November 2011 when a cleaning lady scrubbed Kippenberger”s 800,000 euro insured artwork Wenn”s anfängt durch die Decke zu tropfen bare and thus irretrievably destroyed it.
In 2013, director Angela Richter staged at Schauspiel Köln the play Kippenberger! An Excess of the Moment.
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