Martin Kippenberger, Candidature à une retrospective, 2. Version: Porträt Martin Kippenberger von 1972, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1993. © Estate of Martin Kippenberger, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne
T.ü. (Titel überflüssig/Title Superfluous)T.ü. (Titel überflüssig/Title Superfluous)08.09. - 04.12.2016Martin Kippenberger (born 1953 in Dortmund, died 1997 in Vienna) is one of the foremost and simultaneously most controversial artists of the twentieth century. “Self-promoter”, “enfant terrible”, “art-punk”, “bogey of the bourgeois” – the labels adhering to Kippenberger are as numerous as they are vacuous, but always concentrate on the artist’s exceptional personality. One reason for this might be that a personality cult has always clung to the most prominent artists of twentieth-century art, among whom Kippenberger meanwhile surely belongs. Kippenberger himself recognised this tendency early on and exploited it: from the first stickers to his last paintings – self-portraits, “Kippy”, the artist-figure, remains a constant. Even before the dawn of the Internet and selfie-age he groomed himself as a kind of template, played a virtuoso etude on the grand piano of publicity and did not spare himself in doing so, like “a candle burning at both ends” (Diedrich Diederichsen). However, an interpretation that orbits so intensively around the artist as a person and links such attempts closer and closer to his biography presents a strongly simplistic and not unproblematic approach to an art that mocks and eschews all categorisation – its sole genuine principle even being perhaps: anti-category. Thus as far back as 1979 Kippenberger was laconically saying: “All right, you can categorise me – If you can.”Kippenberger’s work covers painting, drawing and graphics, sculpture, photography, posters, installations, performance, artist’s books and writing, also curatorial and collecting activities; this capability of being classified and all the “isms” of art history are the very things he avoids. Nevertheless, Kippenberger’s work has been canonised and has arrived in the cathedrals of art. This has to do with the topicality of his fundamental questioning about artistic authorship, into which he integrated “everything and everybody”. “Think today, ready tomorrow,” was one of Kippenberger’s famous premises, a pithy expression for the Utopia of artistic originality. Complex channelling of citations, verbal wit and manic wordplay, self-referential associative systems, criticism of institutions, self-irony, multi-media awareness and network character – words we might use to describe Kippenberger’s work starting in the mid-1970s, long before these slogans became a firm part of the vocabulary of contemporary art and cultural theory. Kunstforum’s exhibition puts a focus on the paramount significance of Kippenberger’s work from the standpoint of the “next generation”. A sensitive, work-focused approach will show the kind of discourses Kippenberger spurred on with his work and the traps he laid – into which the art business is even now compliantly stumbling.Martin Kippenberger – T.ü. puts a particular focus on language – the medium within Kippenberger’s multimedia oeuvre that he constantly favoured throughout his career and is articulated among other things as image text, pun or verbal witticism and bad joke, misunderstanding, slogan and also in the form of artist books, stickers and posters – as well as on his “Vor- und Nachbilder” (Models and Post-Models) of art history – Gerhard Richter, Joseph Beuys, Théodore Géricault and Pablo Picasso">Pablo Picasso – whom he “processes” with large-scale series of paintings and multiples. The exhibition is being organised in close cooperation with the Estate Martin Kippenberger, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne.Curator: Lisa Ortner-Kreil
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