Martin Kippenberger

For two prolific decades, Martin Kippenberger critiqued consumerism, pop culture, and art world status quo with provocative Neo-Expressionist paintings, sculptures, photographs, collages, and installations. Drawing from disparate art historical references including Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, Sigmar Polke, Pop art, Social Realism, and punk, he remixed old styles to generate wild, funny, and new modes of artmaking. Kippenberger is known for self-portraits in which he riffed on historical paintings and often appropriated others’ work outright. In 1987, he turned a monochrome canvas by Gerhard Richter into a coffee table. For his series “Lieber Maler, Male Mir” (“Dear Painter, Paint for Me,” 1981), Kippenberger commissioned a sign painter in Berlin named Werner to produce several works for him; he then credited them to “Werner Kippenberger.” During his brief lifetime, Kippenberger exhibited extensively in Europe and the United States. He has since been the subject of solo shows at Tate Modern, Kunsthalle Basel, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, among other institutions. His work sells for millions on the secondary market.