German Artist Martin Kippenberger's Art work and Piantings at the saatchi-Gallery
In Martin Kippenberger?s remarkable series of self-portraits from 1988, he pictures himself with a touching lack of vanity. An exaggerated beer belly, folds of fat, a thick neck, and dejected posture present a melancholic, awkward and somewhat grumpy figure. He wears immense white underpants pulled up high on his hips ? rather like a well-known photograph of Picasso.In Paris Bar, Martin Kippenberger writes his own importance in art history. Acting as curator, he installed the café?s art collection; then as shameless self-promoter, he painted the café interior. Reminiscent of eighteenth and nineteenth century paintings of salon interiors, Martin Kippenberger places himself on a par with the masters, drawing on early 20th century American art.
Martin Kippenberger?s career has transformed into an almost cult-like legend, existing as much in lore-ish tradition as in the actual physical works. He?s the guy who bought a run-down gas station in Brazil and named it after a Nazi war criminal. He built an imaginary global subway system with real entrances installed in the Yukon, Leipzig, and a remote field in Greece (and working air vents at various points in between). He opened The Museum of Modern Art in an unused abattoir in Syros (MOMAS). He bought a Gerhard Richter painting to use as a coffee table. For Kippenberger, art wasn?t about disrespect: it was about what he could get away with. Martin Kippenberger developed an elaborate concept of aesthetics where the trivial and the subcultural became as influential on his working practice as the masterpieces of art history. Often sparked off by the banality of life, by politics, media and advertising, for Kippenberger there was no subject which could not be turned into art.
Kellner Des? derives from a stereotype cartoon image of a bent street lamp. Without the figure of the drunk leaning against it, Martin Kippenberger?s deadpan Austrian street is completely empty of human life. To reconfirm the painterliness of the image and the dysfunctional nature of the lamp, he has placed two real wall lights either side of the painted street lamp, to bring a glow of comfort to an otherwise cold and deserted scene. Kellner Des? also once hung in the Paris Bar.Paul Schreber was a senior judge in Germany in the 1870s, whose mental breakdown was recorded in his autobiography Memoirs of a Nervous Illness. Like Jung and Freud, Martin Kippenberger was fascinated by Schreber?s record of life in a mental institution, and presents the viewer with an insight into Schreber?s brain.A dashed-off slacker anthem to portraiture, Martin Kippenberger?s Mr Lonely manages to be sparky and buoyant, melancholy and pierced all at once, in a few seemingly casual brush strokes.
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