Martin Kippenberger - Contemporary Art London Friday, October 13, 2006 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Galerie Max Hetzler, Cologne

  • Exhibited

    Cologne, Galerie Max Hetzler, Martin Kippenberger, Die I.N.P Bilder, 1984, n.p. (illustrated)

  • Catalogue Essay

    “I am not a ‘real’ painter, nor a ‘real’ sculptor, I only look at all that from the outside and sometimes try my hand at it, trying to add my own particular spice. I’m not interested in provoking people, but only in trying to be consoling. I always think of the things I do, quite unambiguously, as truly living vehicles. Assuming roles is something that simply won’t work for me, since I don’t have a style. None at all. My style is where you the individual and where a personality is communicated through actions, decisions, single objects and facts, where the whole draws together to form a history.” (M. Kippenberger interviewed by Jutta Koehler, Flash Art, 1990)

    By the time of his death in 1997, Martin Kippenberger was the leading German artist of his generation, considered painting’s fearless outspoken critic and also its great anti-hero. Unlike a previous generation of artists who, under the influence of Joseph Beuys, viewed the artist as a shamanistic savior of sorts, Kippenberger’s generation viewed the artist as a symptom of the cyclic regression from Capitalism to Fascism and back again. With respect to the role of the artist as the guardian of utopian or transcendental longings, Kippenberger was neither a pessimist nor an optimist but an existentialist in the truest sense. For him, individuals are free agents in a deterministic and seemingly meaningless universe. Controversial, ironic, enfant terrible, bad boy of German contemporary art, Kippenberger experienced all kinds of nicknames, but even when disparaged by the establishment, he continually shaped and influenced its scene.

    The present lot, Frau Mit Viel Zeit, is evocative and timeless. Kippenberger brings to the work his long artistic legacy—placing the solitary female figure standing at the end of a wooden dock, the cast of a fading golden sun silhouetting the canvas with vibrant hues.

54

Frau Mit Viel Zeit

1984
Oil on canvas in four parts.
Overall 59 x 71 in. (149.9 x 180.3 cm).

Estimate
£400,000 - 600,000 

Sold for £433,600

Contemporary Art

14 Oct 2006, 7pm
London