Martin Kippenberger

Martin Kippenberger, Fred the Frog rings the Bell once a Penny Hot Cross Buns, Cologne 1991, p. 15, illustrated

Martin Kippenberger was the leading German artist of his generation, using conceptual wit and material subversion to constantly undermine the established values of artistic creation throughout his tragically short life. As with artists such as Andy Warhol and Joseph Beuys, Kippenberger’s persona and life were inextricably linked to his art work and it is his self portraits which perhaps best mark out the progression of his thought. Sandwiched between two major series of self portraits executed in 1988 and 1992, Untitled from 1990 represents perhaps the ultimate anti self portrait for Martin Kippenberger and his alter ego, Fred the Frog. Where the other series of self-portraits had overturned the tradition of the form by depicting the artist in the most unflattering, unexpressive view possible, complete with cycling shorts or large white briefs and beer belly, here the artist had become the unfortunate prince who had been excluded from the party and turned into a frog at midnight.

Always playing with various mediums and artistic forms, Kippenberger had made a beautifully crafted wooden sculpture of this character in the same year as this painting and, nailed to a cross as if crucified, Fred the Frog appears to be the ultimate symbol of disenfranchisement and exclusion. In Untitled, Kippenberger goes further by revolving the character and hanging him upside down against a background incorporating a host of complex references. The cross here is constructed by literally re-presented logos of SAUBER and TRALALA.  Probably borrowed from packaging or billboards, the origin is not important here, only the style of the lettering as a form of contemporary collage. The particularity of the word “Sauber” (meaning clean in German) and the more throwaway “Trallala” probably allude to Kippenberger’s life long rejection of the principles of cleanliness of execution and good taste dogmatised by his contemporaries.

Beneath we can trace a rare painterly variation of Kippenberger’s celebrated series of ‘hotel drawings’. Kippenberger had an almost obsessive habit of drawing onto the stationary of hotels he visited around the world as a way of marking his passage on earth. It seems that in this work Kippenberger, the lone revolutionary, is seeking to overcome his incertitude by gripping his alter-ego in the reassuring reality of everyday life materialised by the stationary.

Kippenberger proves his undoubted painterly prowess through his skilful manipulation of the medium to blend word, colour, design, art, abstraction and figuration. He came to prominence during the period of Neo-Expressionism, but where many of these artists sought ever grander means of elaborating their own direct form of personal painterly expression, Kippenberger had far deeper concerns expressed through a variety of material forms. By integrating a veritable cacophony of ideas, thoughts, symbols and brands, the artist somehow finds a thoroughly contemporary means to expose the loneliness of the late twentieth century artist.