FEATURES ARCHIVE

Widely regarded as one of the greatest German artists of his generation, Martin Kippenberger was also well known for his provocative and jocular public persona. The works offered in this sale are as diverse as the artist himself.

Untitled is a self-portrait with a difference – far from the celebratory or self-promoting depictions associated with this genre. Instead, in humble ball-point pen, Kippenberger has shown himself leaning, albeit in a dandyish, debonair manner, against filing cabinets while wearing oversized underwear, referencing a well known photograph of Pablo Picasso in a similar undergarment.

Kippenberger, in adopting similar clothing, is deliberately puncturing the machismo of the Spanish painter and thereby undermining the entire cult of the artist. He is knocking both himself and Picasso from their respective pedestals. Even the choices of medium appear in part to refer to Picasso's legacy: in using the perversely unartistic-seeming ballpoint pen, Kippenberger is referring to Picasso's often unorthodox choice of equipment. But he is also chipping away at the concepts of hierarchy and high art that he felt permeated so much of the art world, and against which his works were a constant barrage.

Self-portraiture, whether overt or oblique, was one of the most important features of Kippenberger’s oeuvre, and recurred again and again in myriad novel forms, be it in the Lieber Maler, male mir series in which he commissioned a poster-painter to create large-scale paintings several of which were based on photographs of Kippenberger himself, in his mass of printed materials, in his sculpture Martin, ab in die Ecke und schäm Dich made in 1989 or in his later incarnation as the Eggman.

In the centre is a stove-like contraption that relates to an earlier series of Kippenberger’s works, the Peter sculptures, in which he threw into question notions of authorship and ownership, working with assistants to create the works. This creates an intriguing interplay between the self-portrait and this sculpture, which is his yet not his... It is through these somersaults that Kippenberger disrupted the entire question of artistic creation and identity, legacies which artists continue to grapple with today.