Untitled

1988 - Installation (Installation)

39 3/8 x 31 1/8 in.

Martin Kippenberger

location: Vienna, Austria
year born: 1953
gender: male
nationality: German
home town: Dortmund, Germany

Martin Kippenberger’s late collages are known for incorporating a wide range of materials, from polaroids and magazine clips to hotel stationery, decals, and graphite drawings. Untitled is a collage on paper work by Kippenberger that typifies his everything-goes approach: a barely discernible, sliced image of Michael Jackson’s face is overlaid and woven with strips and triangular shapes from a different source into a single composition. Blue tones come from torn out pages of a book where fragments of illustrations can be seen. Together, all the elements suggest an alternative, highly stylized portrait of the artist; in this case, a fragmented, fluid, and itinerant sense of identity. Consistent with other works by the artist, Untitled defies any specific style and continues Kippenberger’s inquiry into the self and its potential to manifest through the objects and materials that we modify.


Martin Kippenberger is widely regarded as one of the most talented German artists of his generation. Although he was incredibly prolific in a diverse range of media—drawings, collage, sculpture, performance, painting, photography, installations, prints, ephemera.—his best-known works are paintings, many of them self-portraits. Kippenberger was a very polarizing figure, known by many for being a provocateur and for making politically charged work as artworld commentary. Often taking on different art historical tropes, his work tested the boundaries of authorship and originality. He was known to hire others to paint for him under a pseudonym, or use work by other artists to create new work. Examples include restaging a photograph of Pablo Picasso; turning a monochrome by Gerard Richter into a coffee table; and claiming an installation of his as the last chapter of an unfinished novel by Franz Kafka. One of his key concerns was to try to understand the artist’s place in the modern world, and how their essence and personality can become apparent in the objects that they create.


Colors:



Pair of shoes / Shoes with eggs
© » KADIST

Hans-Peter Feldmann

The types of objects Feldmann is interested in collecting into serial photographic grids or artist’s books are often also found in three dimensional installations...

Teapot with shadow
© » KADIST

Hans-Peter Feldmann

The types of objects Feldmann is interested in collecting into serial photographic grids or artist’s books are often also found in three dimensional installations...

I am the Greatest
© » KADIST

Hank Willis Thomas

2012

Like many of his other sculptural works, the source of I am the Greatest is actually a historical photograph of an identical button pin from the 1960s...

Cemetery #1
© » KADIST

Gabriel Orozco

2002

Gabriel Orozco comments: “In the exhibition [Documenta 11, Kassel, 2002], I tried to connect with the photographs I took in Mali in July...

Black Imitates White
© » KADIST

Hank Willis Thomas

2012

Thomas’ lenticular text-based works require viewers to shift positions as they view them in order to fully absorb their content...

Ponderosa Pine IV
© » KADIST

Rodney Graham

1991

Ponderosa Pine IV belongs to a series of large-scale photographs of trees taken by Graham and depicts a particular species that live in Northern California...

I Am A Man
© » KADIST

Hank Willis Thomas

2013

The image is borrowed from protests during Civil Rights where African Americans in the south would carry signs with the same message to assert their rights against segregation and racism...

Meeting #100
© » KADIST

Jonathan Monk

Meeting #100 is one in a series of text works by Jonathan Monk...

The Nightwatch
© » KADIST

Francis Alÿs

2004

The Nightwatch , which is an ironic reference to the celebrated painting by Rembrandt, follows the course of a fox wandering among the celebrated collections of the National Portrait Gallery in London...

Black Hands, White Cotton
© » KADIST

Hank Willis Thomas

2014

Shot in black and white and printed on a glittery carborundum surface, Black Hands, White Cotton both confronts and abstracts the subject of its title...

Bread and Roses
© » KADIST

Hank Willis Thomas

2012

Bread and Roses takes its name from a phrase famously used on picket signs and immortalized by the poet James Oppenheim in 1911...

Blind Spencer (Mirror)
© » KADIST

Douglas Gordon

2002

Blind Spencer is part of the series “Blind Stars” including hundreds of works in which the artist cut out the eyes of Hollywood stars, in a symbolically violent manner...

Owl
© » KADIST

Raymond Pettibon

2006

The five works included in the Kadist Collection are representative of Pettibon’s complex drawings which are much more narrative than comics or cartoon...

Tree on the Former Site of Camera Obscura
© » KADIST

Rodney Graham

1996

Tree on the Former Site of Camera Obscura (1996) belongs to a series of large-scale photographs of trees taken by Graham and depicts a particular species that lives in Northern California...

No Title (Without the comics)
© » KADIST

Raymond Pettibon

2007

The five works included in the Kadist Collection are representative of Pettibon’s complex drawings which are much more narrative than comics or cartoon...

The End One
© » KADIST

Raymond Pettibon

2005

The five works included in the Kadist Collection are representative of Pettibon’s complex drawings which are much more narrative than comics or cartoon...