Martin Kippenberger (1953 - 1997)

Joseph Beuys said: “Everyone – each person – is an artist.”

Martin Kippenberger said: “Every artist is a person.”

As one of the most prodigious artists of the 1980s and 90s, Martin Kippenberger epitomised the romantic notion of the artist in the late 20th century. Inventing himself as the centre of the art world, Martin Kippenberger’s practice was based on shameless self-promotion. Mythologizing himself as an Everyman-hero, Kippenberger’s vast body of work is a testament to a larger-than-life character, a tragic-comic paladin, plagued as much by his own talent and success as by his ego and shortcomings.

Painting figures highly in Martin Kippenberger’s work. Consciously aware of its power of legitimisation, Kippenberger made paintings ceaselessly throughout his career. As a painter, Martin Kippenberger was almost a prodigal talent: refusing to be identified by a ‘style’, each of his canvases demonstrates an immense understanding and control of representation, composition and gesture. Subjects as eclectic as his multi-facetted practice are often taken from the mundane and everyday. His favourite café in Berlin, the Chevrolet Capri, and abstract paintings constructed of beach towels all serve to underscore the idea of an art for all: democratic, easy and as infinitely limitless and valued as the most cultured treasure.

Kippenberger is often regarded as an antidote to Joseph Beuys. Beuys thought everyone was an artist. Kippenberger titled a painting Every Artist a Human Being; it showed an artist crucified over an easel. He made several horrible portraits of Beuys’s mother. While Beuys used fat, and Sigmar Polke invoked Higher Beings and magic mushrooms in his art, Kippenberger titled one of his own works Painted Under the Influence of Spaghetti No 7. Which is not to avoid the fact that Polke’s 1960s paintings are one of Kippenberger’s models for his own work.

He was at the centre of his art, always acting a part, playing a role. “I am a travelling salesman,” he insisted. “I deal in ideas” - even if those ideas were not his own. Who owns an idea anyway? It is where you take it that counts.