Martin Kippenberger

Regarded by many as among the most talented German artists of his generation, Martin Kippenberger (1953-1997) established a practice that included all mediums, performance and artist collaborations. Kippenberger was the center of an important group of post-conceptual infants terribles in Germany that included artists Albert Oehlen, Markus Oehlen, Georg Herold, Werner Büttner, and Günther Förg. In his work, Kippenberger sought to disrupt art’s complacency with a satirist’s wit that directs the viewer to uncomfortable realities of the present world.

Dissuaded of art’s power to reveal truth or the possibility of producing original work, he nonetheless produced new important work with a strong political and social content, revealing, as John Lane observed, “a moralist in despair.” The exhibition features a selection of paintings from the last decade of the artist’s life and fourteen “Hotel Drawings,” intimate works created on hotel stationary gathered on his peripatetic travels from 1987 until 1997. The works present an irreverent and ferocious humor that cumulatively accentuate the late artist’s acute sense of moral responsibility to humanity and the history of art.

This exhibition is part of an ongoing series of contemporary art exhibitions organized by Bruce Guenther, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art.