馬丁·基本伯格

A gift from the artist to the present owner in 1975

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the grey has less red undertones in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. There are some slight surface irregularities to the figures face, likely to be a result of the artist's working process. Close inspection reveals a minute fly spot towards the top right corner. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultra-violet light.
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Confrontational and sardonic, Fickn, in which the artist's disembodied head and hands emerge from the centre of the square canvas board, is one of Martin Kippenberger's earliest self-portraits, executed in 1975 when he was just 22. Even at this early stage his work demonstrates the sense of irreverence and unorthodoxy that would come to mark both Kippenberger's life and art, two inextricably linked elements that would merge together in his self-portraits. With crazed eyes, gestural hands, and a closely cropped composition, this work strongly evokes the famous self-portrait by Gustave Courbet, The Desperate Man (1843-45). Acting as a precedent for the celebrated self-portraits in the Lieber Maler, Male Mir series (1981) and the Picasso Paintings (1988), Fickn thus challenges the myth of the heroic artist. Whether playing the dandy or the dejected, self-portraiture forms the central component of Kippenberger's artistic career, offering him the opportunity to undermine the traditional expectations of the genre through the self-deprecation that was at the heart of the many guises he assumed.  

Kippenberger's self-portraits were often the product of the very specific environment within which he found himself, and the concerns that were central to him, at the time of their creation. Fickn is no different, and it’s sexual overtones and theatricality belong to a particularly hedonistic period in Kippenberger’s life, before he left Hamburg for Florence in 1976 to pursue his ambitions as an actor. Kippenberger's warped sense of humour is on display, evident both from the title, with Fickn being one letter away from the German 'ficken', and the dedication running along the bottom edge of the canvas, which reads in English “Madhouse – Address Clear –Deprived Kid + Rat – Fickn Fickn Fickn – F. Jochen from Kippy with red leather pants 1975”. This bizarre humour is also clearly evinced by the subject of the painting: the intensely, leering face and the condom wearing fingers of the grasping hands, as illustrated in a photograph of the artist taken in 1975. Could it be that it is Kippenberger's libido itself that is at the butt of this joke? A year later, whilst in Florence he would state that “indescribably ugly girls are batting their eyelids at me, trying to get my attention - whispering to each other, grinning – if I were to take just one of the two (never mind which) up to my room – it would surely be an unforgettable Italian night” (Daniel Baumann, Christian Bernard and Martin Kippenberger, Eds., Kippenberger sans peine. Kippenberger leicht gemacht, Geneva 1997, p. 12).

Fickn is also the mirror image of a coloured pencil and paper work executed by Kippenberger in the same year titled Gil Funccius, a name synonymous with Krautrock, a form of minimalist electronic music that emerged in Germany in the late 1960s. Funccius was a Berlin based artist, whose entirely individual and radical style of album cover-design decorated some of the most recognisable albums of the Krautrock era. In Fickn a nod to Funccius may be seen in Kippenberger’s decision to split the background into two colour fields using a diagonal line, reminiscent of her cover for Annexus Quam’s 1970 album Osmose. Kippenberger’s interest in Krautrock foreshadowed his foray into the punk rock world at the end of the decade, when he played in a band and took over the management of the SO36 club in Berlin, frequented by the likes of Iggy Pop and David Bowie.

Also relating to the artist’s concerns of the time, the element of performance and stage presence found in Fickn were perhaps conditioned by Kippenberger’s dreams as an actor, an ambition he attempted to realise in 1976 during his stay in Florence. Fickn may be one of the only Kippenberger self-portraits in which vanity is not completely absent: the slicked back hair and strong features have something of the devilish villain to them. Kippenberger himself claimed to look like “Helmut Berger in his prime”, the famously handsome Austrian actor (Ibid., p. 8).

The sexually candid, vaudevillian, Krautrock inspired Fickn was undoubtedly the result of Kippenberger’s concerns at the time and is a work of considerable importance from the beginning of the artist’s career, standing at the outset of one of the twentieth-century’s most profoundly original and individual attempts at artistic self-investigation.