Martin Kippenberger

Art Brokerage: Martin Kippenberger German Artist: b. 1953-1997. Martin Kippenberger (25 February 1953 – 7 March 1997) was a German artist known for his extremely prolific output in a wide range of styles and media, superfiction as well as his provocative, jocular and hard-drinking public persona. Kippenberger was "widely regarded as one of the most talented German artists of his generation," according to Roberta Smith of the New York Times. He was at the center of a generation of German enfants terribles including Albert Oehlen, Markus Oehlen, Werner Büttner, Georg Herold, Dieter Göls, and Günther Förg. Kippenberger's refusal to adopt a specific style and medium in which to disseminate his images resulted in an extremely prolific and varied oeuvre which includes an amalgam of sculpture, paintings, works on paper, photographs, installations, prints and ephemera. Throughout the 1980s, Kippenberger's artwork underwent periods of strong political reflection. During a trip to Brazil in 1986, Kippenberger bought a gas station by the sea in Salvador de Bahia and renamed it the Martin Bormann Gas Station. With the fictionally acquired gas station, Kippenberger gave Martin Bormann a camouflage address and the possibility of an income in exile; Kippenberger allegedly installed a telephone line and employees were obliged to answer calls with 'Tankstelle Martin Bormann'. Later accused of neo-Nazi attitudes by German critic Wolfgang Max Faust, he made several life-size, dressed mannequin sculptures of himself, called Martin, ab in die Ecke und schäm Dich (Martin, into the Corner, You Should Be Ashamed of Yourself) (1989), placed facing the wall. An artist of a wide variety of media, his work is unified by the adolescent humor that makes fun of art and artists and the perception that art and artists are grandiose and important. He was born in Dortmund Germany and began studying art in Hamburg in 1972. He then moved to Berlin and was business manager of a famous bar, the S.O. 36. In 1986, the first museum exhibition of his work was held at the Hessiches Landesmuseum in Darmstadt, Germany. He has also had solo exhibitions at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington D.C. and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Listings wanted by Art Brokerage.