Untitled (Self-portrait)

As though caught in mid-stride, the artist, pictures under his arm, brushes in hand, is shown captured in a moment so spontaneous that he is not shown in full. There is a sense of movement and also crucially, of fun in the deliberately informal composition of Untitled, painted in 1994-95, and this is accentuated by the incorporation of real stretchers and canvases within the work. The painted arm has been cut out so as to be able to brace these pictures under it, creating a strange blurring of the lines between the painted reality and the reality of the viewer. This is the opposite of representation, the opposite of the trompe-l'oeil process on which figurative painting supposedly relies. Instead, the ever-rebellious Kippenberger presents us with a painting that undermines and yet, in its theme, overtly celebrates his status as a painter. Not only is the artist disrupting his status as an artist, but, in showing only the back of his head, he has managed to subvert this painting's effectiveness as a self-portrait. And yet, in the irrepressible sense of Kippenberger's iconoclasm and idiosyncrasy that this painting conveys, it remains a true self-portrait.

On one of the stretchers, a fragment of a painting is still visible, cut vertically. It shows a man in a tavern with the clichéd Greek name meaning 'The Sailors'. This is at once a reflection of the lifestyle in Greece that Kippenberger loved so much and which drew him back there again and again, a reflection of the mercenary aspects of being a painter depicting small-scale scenes of almost kitsch village life suited to a tourist's tastes (and therefore all the more gleefully sliced), and also a reflection of Kippenberger's espousal of the small-scale, the domestic, the personal, the human, as opposed to the monolithic commercial and cultural structures that dominate modern life.