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Lot Essay
Held in the De La Cruz Collection since 2004, Man möge mir den Rest geben (Couldn’t Someone Push Me Over The Edge) (1983) is a vivid example of the playful, anarchic paintings that helped to make Martin Kippenberger the ‘king of Cologne’ in the mid-1980s. Kippenberger drew on a dizzying range of source material during this prolific period, using what Diedrich Diederichsen calls ‘vulgarity and mediatedness’ as a ‘a new form of authentic handle on the world that befitted the time’ (D. Diederichsen, ‘“Selbstdarsteller”: Martin Kippenberger between 1977 and 1983’, in Nach Kippenberger / After Kippenberger, exh. cat. mumok, Vienna 2003, p. 49). The present work depicts an artist’s mannequin playing a violin amid fields of dripping blue and green paint, pods of red berries and a crudely figured plant. In the foreground a bar of sheet music is formed by a treble clef, brown rods and notes that look like fallen petals. The titular phrase, in yellow paint squeezed straight from the tube, arcs up the left-hand side. Exemplary in its pile-up of jarring imagery, bold colour and unorthodox technique, the painting’s show of performance—with its musical motif and tragicomic title—also displays the introspective vein that ran through Kippenberger’s artistic persona.
Kippenberger took on many different guises throughout his career, travelling incessantly and constantly exploring new avenues of production. In 1976, with a large inheritance following the death of his mother, he set off to Florence in a fruitless search for acting work. He moved to Berlin in 1978, where he managed the post-punk nightclub SO36. In 1980, he attempted to write a novel while based in Paris. His first series of self-portraits—the Liebe Maler, male mir paintings, whose execution he outsourced to a commercial airbrush artist—were made in Berlin the following year. Moving at the end of 1982 from Stuttgart to Cologne, he became the figurehead of the hard-partying, boisterous and iconoclastic scene surrounding Max Hetzler’s gallery, which opened there a few months later. 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’, Max Hetzler said. ‘He led the way. Wherever he was, you couldn’t miss him’ (M. Hetzler quoted in S. Kippenberger, Kippenberger: The Artist and His Families, New York 2011, p. 245).
In Cologne, Kippenberger worked with motifs derived from postcards, magazines, cartoons and photographic collages of his own devising. His paintings were layered, adulterated and inscribed with insulation foam, glue, resin, dried paint skins or—as in the present work—paint piped from the tube like icing. According to Oehlen, he would often make notes of remarks he heard in bars and pubs and use these words for his titles. It is possible that the phrase Man möge mir den Rest geben has such an origin. Social activity was on an equal footing with painting in Kippenberger’s Gesamtkunstwerk: the expensive, totalising theatrical system that defined his artistic strategy. He used the image of the mannequin in several works of 1983 and 1984. While no fixed meaning can be ascribed to the figure, it might be seen to function as something of a self-portrait, embodying the strain of his all-out conflation of art, life and performance, and foreshadowing the iconic, wretched and humorous self-images he would create later in the 1980s. ‘We spurred each other on, and everyone wanted to wow everyone else’, remembers Oehlen of the Hetzler days. ‘... It was also extremely exhausting’ (A. Oehlen, quoted in S. Kippenberger, ibid., p. 246).
Kippenberger took on many different guises throughout his career, travelling incessantly and constantly exploring new avenues of production. In 1976, with a large inheritance following the death of his mother, he set off to Florence in a fruitless search for acting work. He moved to Berlin in 1978, where he managed the post-punk nightclub SO36. In 1980, he attempted to write a novel while based in Paris. His first series of self-portraits—the Liebe Maler, male mir paintings, whose execution he outsourced to a commercial airbrush artist—were made in Berlin the following year. Moving at the end of 1982 from Stuttgart to Cologne, he became the figurehead of the hard-partying, boisterous and iconoclastic scene surrounding Max Hetzler’s gallery, which opened there a few months later. 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’, Max Hetzler said. ‘He led the way. Wherever he was, you couldn’t miss him’ (M. Hetzler quoted in S. Kippenberger, Kippenberger: The Artist and His Families, New York 2011, p. 245).
In Cologne, Kippenberger worked with motifs derived from postcards, magazines, cartoons and photographic collages of his own devising. His paintings were layered, adulterated and inscribed with insulation foam, glue, resin, dried paint skins or—as in the present work—paint piped from the tube like icing. According to Oehlen, he would often make notes of remarks he heard in bars and pubs and use these words for his titles. It is possible that the phrase Man möge mir den Rest geben has such an origin. Social activity was on an equal footing with painting in Kippenberger’s Gesamtkunstwerk: the expensive, totalising theatrical system that defined his artistic strategy. He used the image of the mannequin in several works of 1983 and 1984. While no fixed meaning can be ascribed to the figure, it might be seen to function as something of a self-portrait, embodying the strain of his all-out conflation of art, life and performance, and foreshadowing the iconic, wretched and humorous self-images he would create later in the 1980s. ‘We spurred each other on, and everyone wanted to wow everyone else’, remembers Oehlen of the Hetzler days. ‘... It was also extremely exhausting’ (A. Oehlen, quoted in S. Kippenberger, ibid., p. 246).