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Descriptif du lot
Created in 1990, the present painting belongs to Martin Kippenberger’s vibrant and multilayered Fred the frog series. After an initial work made in Seville in 1988—where he had completed his famous group of self-portraits as Pablo Picasso—Kippenberger worked on these paintings in Venice, Los Angeles across the following two years. They proliferated in complex and riotous fashion, featuring diverse combinations of fragmented text, crucifixion imagery and generative motifs such as the fried egg. They were unveiled at Max Hetzler’s gallery in Cologne in 1991, accompanied by an artist’s book that interspersed them with poems in English and translated German. The present work lists the words Witz, Effekt, Gefühle, Bild and Anscha[u]ung (‘Joke’, ‘Effect’, ‘Feelings’, ‘Image’ and ‘Intuition’) amid dappled marks, scribbles and blurred red and white impasto over a gold-toned background. A fried egg sprouting a human finger—a recurring emblem across the series—is outlined in green. A tiny crucified figure hides in the ‘G’ of Gefühle. The painting is complex, unruly and vital, charged with the ideas of transformation, abjection and collaboration that drove Kippenberger’s extraordinary practice.
Kippenberger took on many different guises throughout his career, travelling incessantly and constantly exploring new avenues of production. Having tried his hand as an actor, nightclub manager and novelist in Florence, Berlin and Paris, during the 1980s he became the figurehead of the boisterous and iconoclastic scene surrounding Max Hetzler’s gallery in Cologne. Alongside his friends Werner Büttner and Albert Oehlen, Kippenberger blossomed in this performative milieu. Reacting against the cool conceptualism of the 1970s and the petit-bourgeois society of post-war West Germany, these artists were charismatic, excessive and provocative in their paintings and behaviour alike. ‘Martin was in the vanguard’, Hetzler said. ‘He led the way. Wherever he was, you couldn’t miss him’ (quoted in S. Kippenberger, Kippenberger: The Artist and His Families, New York, 2011, p. 245).
By the end of the 1980s Kippenberger was in search of something new, and he decided to try and make it in America. After a frustrating few months in New York, which he found restrictive, he moved to the more sunny and relaxed environment of Los Angeles. Kippenberger left a lasting impression. Filling an empty house with furniture and a huge television—on which crowds of friends would watch World Cup football matches—he held legendary parties and created what his assistant Jory Felice called ‘a pretty great little world.’ ‘Pictures by Jeff Koons, Zoe Leonard, and Michael Krebber hung on the walls,’ writes his sister, Susanne Kippenberger, ‘and there was a giant photo of Audrey Hepburn in the studio’ (ibid., p. 380). He worked prolifically on his Fred the frog pictures, latex paintings and sculptures during this period, and met the curator John Caldwell, who—to Kippenberger’s delight—offered him a solo show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1991.
Like the Picasso impressions that preceded them and the ‘Hand Painted Pictures’ that would follow in 1992, the Fred the frog works were ultimately self-portraits, and, despite their American context, remained entangled in Kippenberger’s ever-evolving social and creative network in Germany. The present picture’s speckled marks are derived from a detail of John Cage und der lustige Schuh (John Cage and the Funny Shoe) (1987), a work from Jiří Georg Dokoupil’s ‘Esoteric Paintings’ series. Dokoupil, whose practice was almost as eclectic and intense as Kippenberger’s, had founded the avant-garde Mülheimer Freiheit group in Cologne in 1980 and was something of an elder statesman in the scene. The two were variously friends and bitter enemies, collaborating on artists’ books and riffing off one another’s exhibitions. At one point Kippenberger tried to lure away Dokoupil’s assistant Reiner Opoku, saying ‘You can’t seriously want to work for the worst painter in the world!’ (quoted in ibid., p. 296). Opoku later spent time with Kippenberger in Los Angeles, accompanying him on a day-long walk from Venice to Sunset Boulevard.
The fried egg, which recurs across the Fred the frog works, was a favourite motif of Kippenberger’s. While the series’ stagings of human and amphibian crucifixion relate to his self-promotion, self-abasement and self-mockery as an artist, the egg—at once absurd and profound—is a symbol of fertility and constant change. Here it seems to be conflated with the artist’s hand, birthing a frog-green finger from its yolk. ‘The factor that holds all these sometimes grotesque combinations of pictorial elements together’, write the editors of Kippenberger’s catalogue raisonné, ‘is the ubiquity of processes of transformation and mutation: from egg to tadpole to frog, from frog to human being, from artist to crucified figure, from watching to sacrificed, from man to woman (or vice versa), from condemned man to saviour and from dead to resurrected—but also from rapture to disillusion, and from irreverence to gravitas’ (G. Capitain, R. Fiorito and L. Franzen, eds., Martin Kippenberger: Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, Volume III 1987-1992, Cologne, 2016, p. 153).
Kippenberger took on many different guises throughout his career, travelling incessantly and constantly exploring new avenues of production. Having tried his hand as an actor, nightclub manager and novelist in Florence, Berlin and Paris, during the 1980s he became the figurehead of the boisterous and iconoclastic scene surrounding Max Hetzler’s gallery in Cologne. Alongside his friends Werner Büttner and Albert Oehlen, Kippenberger blossomed in this performative milieu. Reacting against the cool conceptualism of the 1970s and the petit-bourgeois society of post-war West Germany, these artists were charismatic, excessive and provocative in their paintings and behaviour alike. ‘Martin was in the vanguard’, Hetzler said. ‘He led the way. Wherever he was, you couldn’t miss him’ (quoted in S. Kippenberger, Kippenberger: The Artist and His Families, New York, 2011, p. 245).
By the end of the 1980s Kippenberger was in search of something new, and he decided to try and make it in America. After a frustrating few months in New York, which he found restrictive, he moved to the more sunny and relaxed environment of Los Angeles. Kippenberger left a lasting impression. Filling an empty house with furniture and a huge television—on which crowds of friends would watch World Cup football matches—he held legendary parties and created what his assistant Jory Felice called ‘a pretty great little world.’ ‘Pictures by Jeff Koons, Zoe Leonard, and Michael Krebber hung on the walls,’ writes his sister, Susanne Kippenberger, ‘and there was a giant photo of Audrey Hepburn in the studio’ (ibid., p. 380). He worked prolifically on his Fred the frog pictures, latex paintings and sculptures during this period, and met the curator John Caldwell, who—to Kippenberger’s delight—offered him a solo show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1991.
Like the Picasso impressions that preceded them and the ‘Hand Painted Pictures’ that would follow in 1992, the Fred the frog works were ultimately self-portraits, and, despite their American context, remained entangled in Kippenberger’s ever-evolving social and creative network in Germany. The present picture’s speckled marks are derived from a detail of John Cage und der lustige Schuh (John Cage and the Funny Shoe) (1987), a work from Jiří Georg Dokoupil’s ‘Esoteric Paintings’ series. Dokoupil, whose practice was almost as eclectic and intense as Kippenberger’s, had founded the avant-garde Mülheimer Freiheit group in Cologne in 1980 and was something of an elder statesman in the scene. The two were variously friends and bitter enemies, collaborating on artists’ books and riffing off one another’s exhibitions. At one point Kippenberger tried to lure away Dokoupil’s assistant Reiner Opoku, saying ‘You can’t seriously want to work for the worst painter in the world!’ (quoted in ibid., p. 296). Opoku later spent time with Kippenberger in Los Angeles, accompanying him on a day-long walk from Venice to Sunset Boulevard.
The fried egg, which recurs across the Fred the frog works, was a favourite motif of Kippenberger’s. While the series’ stagings of human and amphibian crucifixion relate to his self-promotion, self-abasement and self-mockery as an artist, the egg—at once absurd and profound—is a symbol of fertility and constant change. Here it seems to be conflated with the artist’s hand, birthing a frog-green finger from its yolk. ‘The factor that holds all these sometimes grotesque combinations of pictorial elements together’, write the editors of Kippenberger’s catalogue raisonné, ‘is the ubiquity of processes of transformation and mutation: from egg to tadpole to frog, from frog to human being, from artist to crucified figure, from watching to sacrificed, from man to woman (or vice versa), from condemned man to saviour and from dead to resurrected—but also from rapture to disillusion, and from irreverence to gravitas’ (G. Capitain, R. Fiorito and L. Franzen, eds., Martin Kippenberger: Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, Volume III 1987-1992, Cologne, 2016, p. 153).