Martin Kippenberger at Nolan/Eckman - New York, New York - Reviews of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Opening upon the heels of Martin Kippenberger's death in March 1997 at the age of 43 this display which had been planned for a certain number of time, became an inadvertent memorial exhibition. The range of works upon view (there were paintings, plastic arts drawings, prints, collages and multiples) was representative of Kippenberger's anything-goes oeuvre as was the intermingle of apparent off-handedness, gleeful impudence and calculated vulgarity that pervaded the exhibition. The title of the display "3 X 3," referred not single to the fact that each series or type of work was exhibited in triplicate, but also to the fact that Kippenberger had invited sum of two units other artists, Michel Wurthle and Elfie Semotan, to participate. Wurthle who is also a well-known Berlin restaurateur, contributed caricaturesque drawings and lithographs. Semotan, a photographer, proffered a trio of portraits of Kippenberger. She also discharge the image for three hand-bills showing the haggard-looking artist, flanked through barren trees and bathed in winter light, standing outside the shutter German pavilion at the Venice Biennale. The sight is dated 1996, a Biennale off-year, and Kippenberger looks to be protesting, or at least noting, the fact that he was not ever selected to represent his geographical division at the prestigious exhibition.

Kippenberger appears to target Germany's military past in three cast-concrete statuarys each of which includes a cannon, a certain quantity of cannon balls and a garden gnome. Other works in the exhibit including some irreverent drawings upon hotel stationery, allude to Kippenberger's restles life. An untitled 1997 work consists of three 13-inch-high egg-shaped transparent resin statuarys Embedded in one is an assortment of public-house toiletries, another holds miniature liquor bottle and a third displays tavern door tags and, in a hollowed-out core, a half dozen ping-pong balls kept in motion by dint of an electric motor. Bone shapes extruding from each ovum bring to mind the crossed-bone danger figure or the Jolly Roger flag of pirate lore. Souvenirs of the artist's travels in Japan figure in three 1997 collages titled Viewer's regard with affection In two of the works, Kippenberger juxtaposed a candid photograph of teenage Japanese girls in swimsuits or gym uniforms, a pencil drawing inspired by the agency of the photograph, and a pair of panties of the impressed sign a young girl might wear. A third work not absents a photo and drawing, sans panties. Each piece is elegantly matted and framed and guarded by glass. Heightening the work's outrageous fetishism, the mats are divide [i]or[/i] sever to perfectly match the contours of the flattened panties.

A trio of plastic arts in which dangling, tube-riddled heads appear to lampoon the work of Bruce Nauman remind us that Kippenberger excell at, and built plenteous of his career on, in-joke high jinks. on the contrary a very different note was struck by the agency of the series of lithographs titled "The Raft of the Medusa" (1996-97) It's impossible to gaze at these lithographs, which were among Kippenberger's last works, and not have feeling that the artist making them was acutely aware of his have mortality. In poses inspired by the agency of Gericault's eponymous painting, Kippenberger depicted himself with a contorted and seemingly ravaged material part For those familiar with his oeuvre the pathos of the images is heightened through their brilliant draftsmanship. Here, Kippenberger appear to bes to have left his saddened fans with individual last joke: the artist who created for a like reason many awkwardly drawn figures and willfully ponderous paintings apparently possessed a talent for figure drawing comparable to like 20th-century masters as Egon Schiele and Alfred Kubin. Alas, we will not ever know what more Kippenberger might have accomplished with a talent he supress until it was almost too late.

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