21 Facts About Martin Kippenberger

Martin Kippenberger was a German painter, drawer, photographer, sculptor, installation and performance artist.

Martin Kippenberger became known for his prolific output in a wide range of styles and media, superfiction, as well as his provocative, jocular and hard-drinking public persona.

Martin Kippenberger was at the center of a generation of German enfants terribles, including Albert Oehlen, Markus Oehlen, Werner Buttner, Georg Herold, Dieter Gols, Michael Krebber, and Gunther Forg.

Martin Kippenberger was born in Dortmund in 1953, the only boy in a family with five children, with two elder and two younger sisters.

Martin Kippenberger's father was director of the Katharina-Elisabeth colliery, his mother a dermatologist.

When Martin Kippenberger's mother was killed by a pallet falling off a truck, he inherited enough money to live on.

In Cologne, as elsewhere, Martin Kippenberger did not limit himself to producing works of art; he worked on how the art was presented, the framework and the sideshows.

Martin Kippenberger stayed in Sankt Georgen im Schwarzwald as a guest of the Grasslin family of art collectors from 1980 to 1981, and later on and off from 1991 to 1994, in order to work but to recover from his excessive life.

Martin Kippenberger died at age 44 from liver cancer at the Vienna General Hospital.

Martin Kippenberger felt that he was working in the face of a 'perceived death of painting' and his art reflects his struggle with the concept that, at the turn of the millennium, it was impossible to produce anything original or authentic.

Re-staging a well-known photograph by David Douglas Duncan of Picasso standing in a 'puffed-up' state of undress on the steps of Chateau of Vauvenargues in 1962 Martin Kippenberger was parodying his famous antecedent, playfully subverting the machismo associated with the genre of self-portraiture.

Martin Kippenberger made the first of Laterne sculptures in 1988, a year that he spent largely living in Seville and Madrid in Spain.

In 1990, while sojourning in New York City, Martin Kippenberger started a body of work collectively known as the Latex or Rubber paintings.

Also in the 1990s, influenced by the Lost Art Movement, Martin Kippenberger had the idea of an underground network encircling the whole world.

In 1985, Martin Kippenberger exhibited "Buying America and Selling El Salvador" at Metro Pictures in New York City, a large installation comprising numerous sculptural works.

Martin Kippenberger has since been the subject of several large retrospective exhibitions, including at the Tate Modern in 2006 and "the Problem Perspective" at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in 2008; the exhibition traveled to the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2009.

Martin Kippenberger collected and commissioned work by many of his peers: some of his exhibition posters were designed by such prominent artists as Jeff Koons, Christopher Wool, Rosemarie Trockel and Mike Kelley.

Martin Kippenberger's work was only considered auction-worthy toward the very end of his life, and even then, it rarely sold for more than $10,000.

Martin Kippenberger's self-portraits have achieved the highest prices for his work.

Martin Kippenberger is represented by Galerie Gisela Capitain, with representation by Skarstedt in New York City.

In 2008, during an exhibition at the Museion in Bozen, Italy, a sculpture by Martin Kippenberger depicting a toad being crucified called Zuerst die Fusse was condemned by Pope Benedict as blasphemous, despite the museum's explanation that it was a "self-portrait illustrating human angst".