Art News recommended by Yong Chen : Martin Kippenberger at Luhring Augustine, Gagosian and Nyehaus

Martin Kippenberger at Luhring Augustine, Gagosian and Nyehaus
Art in America, June-July, 2005 by Stephen Maine

The German-born painter, sculptor, performance artist and musician Martin Kippenberger (1954-1997) is entrenched in the European contemporary art canon. Though not unknown in the U.S., his legend achieved liftoff here with this trio of shows. Modeling his Kippenberger Buro on Warhol's Factory, he operated in a social arena; his art production was part of an ongoing performance, starring himself. He eschewed a signature style, but the corrosively unflattering, mordantly funny "Self Portraits" that were shown at Luhring Augustine are central to his self-made prankster persona. Lore attaches to every work; the 1981 oil-on-canvas triptych "Berlin at Night" is centered on a brushy depiction of the artist's bandaged head while he was recovering from a brutal beating by hooligans. The image is tenderly titled Dialogue with the Young.

A few galvanic images free themselves from the fog of anecdote by their sheer authority. Martin, go in the corner, shame on you (1989) is a life-size, fully clothed figure, hands behind his back, cast in clear polyurethane in which float dozens of cigarette butts. The artist hangs like a jaundiced side of beef from a pair of tiny balloons in an untitled oil, nearly 8 by 7 feet, from 1988. Pathetically mimicking a photo of a well-preserved Picasso, he wears enormous white underpants. And in a series of late lithographs from 1996, Kippenberger renders himself in the exhausted and desperate poses of the figures in Gericault's Raft of the "Medusa."

Determinedly out of step with then-dominant Neo-Expressionism, 10 of the 12 paintings in "Dear Painter, Paint For Me," Kippenberger's 1981 exhibition at Berlin's New Society for Fine Arts, were reunited at Gagosian. They were executed by a sign-painter from photographs supplied by Kippenberger; acrylic on canvas, they have the bland surfaces and soft focus of airbrush, heightened with snappy white highlights. All are untitled, most are 78 3/4 by 118 inches.

In one, the artist relaxes elegantly on a discarded sofa amid bulging bags of trash on a New York street corner, enjoying a cigarette and conflating l'homme du monde and homelessness. The breast pocket of a green suit-jacket, nerdily lined with ballpoint pens, is seen from the wearer's angle of view. And rakishly posing in an ostentatious get-up before a bleak souvenir stand somewhere in East Germany, the artist is flanked by that nation's hammer-and-calipers symbol, which would become the hammer, spider web or sunburst, and pair of breasts of the logo for the Lord Jim Lodge, Kippenberger's imaginary men's club.

That symbol adorns many of the artist's works, including METRO-Net, full-scale subway station entrances leading nowhere. "Keiner hilft Keinen," declares a sign at the door: "Nobody Helps Nobody." Three were commissioned in the artist's lifetime; a transportable version was shown at Documenta X in 1997. The project was central to "Bermuda Triangle: Styros, Paris Bar, and Dawson City," at Nyehaus, which included models, working drawings, documentary photos of the sites and personalities involved, and a jumpy, eight-minute DVD of the 1995 opening ceremony of the Dawson City, Canada, METRO-Net.

The beautiful, 9-foot-tall Lantern (1990), a streetlight with a wanly glowing red bulb teetering atop a pair of curving poles like unsteady legs, established a boozy ambience for numerous exhibition posters, collages and drawings on hotel stationery, such as Untitled, "Palace Hotel" (1995), a colored felt-tip pen version of a favorite alter ego, a cartoon frog crucified on stretcher bars.

Top of Page