Background

Kippenberger was born in Dortmund, Germany, on February 25, 1953. He was raised in Essen in a family with five children. Kippenberger had two younger and two elder sisters, including Susanne Kippenberger. Martin Kippenberger's father, Gerd Kippenberger, served as a director of the Katharina-Elisabeth colliery, while his mother was a dermatologist. The painter was a great-great-grandson of Carl Leverkus, known as the founder of Leverkusen.

Education

After Martin Kippenberger's family moved to Essen in 1956, he studied six years at a school in the Black Forest. As a child, he showed great artistic talent, although he started to skip his art classes when his teacher gave Kippenberger only the second highest grade.

In 1968 Kippenberger dropped out of school and began a decorator's discipleship. However, he was not allowed to finish because of using drugs. Between 1972 and 1976 he studied at the University of Fine Arts of Hamburg (Hochschule für Bildende Kunst) along with Rudolf Hausner, Claus Böhmler and Franz Erhard Walther.

Career

In 1976 Kippenberger moved to Florence, where he intended to become an actor. In Florence, he started to create the series Uno di voi, un tedesco in Firenze. All these works were of the same format, 50x60 cm, in black and white. The following year he returned to Hamburg and got acquainted with Werner Büttner, Albert and Markus Oehlen. In 1977 the first solo show of his Florence pictures was organized at the Petersen Gallery.

In 1978 Martin Kippenberger moved to Berlin. Together with Gisela Capitain, the painter founded Kippenberger's office the same year, organizing exhibitions for young artists. At the same time, Kippenberger became business director of the SO36 event hall. He started a punk band called the Grugas; they recorded a single called Luxus with Christine Hahn and Eric Mitchell. In 1979 Hans Siebert, a professional poster artist, painted the series of twelve works from Kippenberger's ideas. That year he also acted in three films, including Christel Kaufmann’s Gibby West Germany, Ulrike Oettinger’s Bildnis einer Trinkerin (Portrait of a Woman Drunk) and Gisela Stelli’s Liebe Sehnsucht Abenteuer (Love Yearning Adventure), after which he abandoned his career of actor.

In 1980, he moved to Paris in hope to become a writer. In 1981 the painter took part in the group exhibition Rundschau Germany. In 1984, he became a founding member of the Lord Jim Lodge (among its members were Jörg Schlick, Albert Oehlen, and Wolfgang Bauer; their motto was "No-one helps anyone"). Because of health problems he went to the health resort of Knokke, Belgium, in 1985, later creating his sculptural works for the series Hunger Family, and Profit Peaks.

Martin Kippenberger made a trip to Brazil in 1986. The following year he had his first exhibition in France at the Villa Arson, Nice, along with Werner Büttner and Albert and Markus Oehlen. During the last 10 years of his life Martin Kippenberger produced a series of drawings on hotel stationery, which are commonly referred to as the 'hotel drawings' (1987-1997). In 1988 he moved to Spain (Seville and Madrid) with Albert Oehlen. There he created Self-portraits with Underpants, Street Lamp for Drunks and Chicken Disco, which were shown in the Aperto of the Venice Biennale. In 1989 he moved to Los Angeles, buying a 35% share in the ownership of the Italian restaurant Capri in Venice, Los Angeles. Kippenberger and his fellow artist Jeff Koons worked together on an issue of the art journal Parkett the same year.

In 1990, while staying in New York City, Kippenberger started a body of work collectively known as the Latex or Rubber paintings. Since 1992 Kippenberger taught at the Comprehensive University of Kassel, as professor of the Happy Kippenberger Class, and also gave guest lectures at Yale University. In 1992 he participated in Documenta IX in Kassel. In 1997 he participated in the Documenta X in Kassel and in the exhibition Skulptur Projekte in Münster.

Due to his refusal to adopt a particular style resulted in an extremely fruitful and diverse oeuvre. It included a mixture of paintings, sculpture, works on paper, installations, photographs, and prints.

Achievements

• 

  Martin Kippenberger was a prominent painter and sculptor. His art was generally recognized in the mid-nineties. At that time three of his pieces were used by Welsh alternative rock band Manic Street Preachers as the cover for their third album, The Holy Bible, in 1994. His tendency for mixing media, styles and processes had an influence on younger artists on both sides of the Atlantic.
  
  In 1996 he received the Käthe Kollwitz Prize. In 2003 he was posthumously represented at the 50th Venice Biennale together with Candida Höfer for the German Pavilion.
  
  Posthumously, Martin Kippenberger has been a subject of several exhibitions, such as the large-scale show "Martin Kippenberger: The Problem of Perspective" held at The Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2009. Nowadays, his works are held in the collections of the Tate Gallery in London, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., and the Migros Museum in Zurich, etc.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Martin Kippenberger: No Drawing No Cry

• illustration

  • Hotel Drawing (Novotel Amsterdam)

• installation

  • Untitled

  • Transportable Subway Entrance (Crushed)

  • Alcohol torture, can of Schlösser Alt beer, plastic wrapper

  • Disco Bomb

  • The Happy End of Franz Kafka’s Amerika

  • Put Your Eye In Your Mouth

  • Untitled

• painting

  • Eintritt Frei

  • Ich Halt Mich (Gruen)

  • Selbstportät

  • Dialogue with the Youth of Today (detail)

  • Alcohol Torture

  • James Dean

  • Flying tanga

  • Untitled (Schloßberg Hotel)

  • Untitled

  • Onkel Bonbon

  • Beton Landschaft

  • Untitled (from the series of Hand Painted Pictures)

  • Untitled (Aussen Alster Hotel)

  • Buchholz + Schipper

  • Window

  • Untitled

  • Untitled (from the series The Raft of Medusa)

  • Egg Sock

  • Kellner Des

  • Paris Bar Berlin

  • Lonesome?

  • Self Portrait

Views

Quotations: "My style is where you see the individual and where a personality is communicated through actions, decisions, single objects and facts, where the whole draws together to form a history."

"Entertainment and art are not isolated."

"What I'm working on is for people to be able to say that Kippenberger had this really good mood."

"A good artist has less time than ideas."

"I am a travelling salesman. I deal in ideas."

"You really can't bring about anything new with art."

"I can't cut off an ear everyday. Do the Van Gogh here and the Mozart there. Anyway it's exhausting enough always having to check up on what one is really doing!."

"What people will say about me then - or maybe not say - will be the only thing that finally counts."

"I'm not interested in provoking people, but only in trying to be consoling."

Connections

In 1996 Kippenberger got married to Elfie Semotan. The couple parented a daughter, Helena Kippenberger.

Father:

Gerd Kippenberger

Spouse:

Elfie Semotan

Great-great-grandfather:

Carl Leverkus

Daughter:

Helena Kippenberger

References

• Martin Kippenberger: Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, Volume Three 1987–1992
• Martin Kippenberger: The Problem Perspective
• Kippenberger: The Artist and His Families
• Kippenberger