“And never solely the work of ‘artwork’ is recycled; the artist is, too. It won’t occur once more.”
—Stuart Morgan, 1991

Clear outlines, filled-in surfaces, and a muted coloration palette in pastel tones characterize the 52 Heavy Mädel (Heavy Gal) drawings. Created in 1990, they have been executed in pencil and oil pastels on stationery from Cologne’s Resort Chelsea—or their mirrored copies. The collage-like motifs current a sketched retrospective of Kippenberger’s oeuvre. We will discern acquainted set items from Kippenberger’s work, drawings, and sculptures—together with many stemming from his 1987 Peter sculptures. We will learn the titles of works and exhibitions, names and slogans, and even acknowledge Kippenberger himself together with a couple of fellow artists like Jeff Koons and Albert Oehlen. Blended into this creative and biographical kaleidoscope, we additionally discover company id logos equivalent to Barbie, BMW, Chanel, and Marlboro, in addition to the slogan from a well-known band t-shirt that reads ‘I went Loopy with Kiss.’

“Heavy Mädel” adopts the technique of transference, repetition, and transformation employed within the 1989/90 set up Heavy Burschi (Heavy Lad), which was made shortly earlier than, and adapts this strategy to a special medium, counterbalancing the sooner works on a number of ranges.

All of it started with a job software: Merlin Carpenter was interviewing for a job as Martin Kippenberger’s assistant when Kippenberger commissioned him with resampling the artist’s picture cosmos into work taken from illustrations in all of Kippenberger’s artist books and catalogues printed up till that time. When Kippenberger noticed the completed work, he discovered them too painterly, too good, too kitsch. He determined that they needed to develop into double-kitsch. The work have been destroyed and distributed between a complete of three containers. The originals have been photographed beforehand, printed in its unique dimension as an version of two, framed, and exhibited alongside the respective container.
The container fashioned the sculptural middle of those displays as a sort of remoted portray archive. In 1991, Kippenberger offered “Heavy Burschi” in a number of venues directly: on the Museum of Fashionable Artwork in San Francisco, the Wiener Festwochen, and the Kölnischer Kunstverein.
Like the unique work in “Heavy Burschi,” the “Heavy Mädel” drawings have been additionally realised by Carpenter. Made as mirror pictures, the drawings appear to reference the medium of images, and thus the reproductions of the unique work. This work is a stellar instance of how Kippenberger was capable of harness an preliminary thought to develop a complete performative and conceptual universe.

Taken collectively, “Heavy Mädel” and “Heavy Burschi” stage a brief circuit of conceptual and medial derivations in addition to a synthesis of creation, destruction, and resurrection. It’s one in every of Kippenberger’s most radical inquiries into the position of the artist, the art work’s aura, and the artwork world as a complete. He undermines widespread notions of authorship, originality, and reproducibility, whereas making himself a vital a part of such dismantling. This delegated biographical and creative reconfiguration collides with a system designed to validate creative and social hierarchies in addition to concepts of standing.

Questions on what was labelled ‘excessive’ or ‘low’ artwork and the way exhausting or straightforward it was to digest this conflict of motifs, fragments, genres, and worth methods have been elementary points subverted by artists of this technology.

The Heavy Mädel advanced is being exhibited alongside a collection of sculptures from 1987–1989.
The Worktimer from the collection of the Peter sculptures from 1987 consists of a mint-coloured, skeleton-like car. Two briefcases dangle from the entrance, a brief ladder on the again leads upwards, however to nowhere. The whole dysfunctionality of the equipment transforms the dictum ‘time is cash’ and the effectivity and optimisation efforts of the working world right into a hole image of stagnation and futility.

Bergwerk II (‘Coal Mine II’), additionally from the collection of the Peter sculptures from 1987, remembers the coal and ore mining of the Ruhr area with its collieries and winding towers and thus connects with Kippenberger’s biography: He was born in Dortmund, his father Gerd Kippenberger turned director of the Katharina Elisabeth colliery in Essen-Frillendorf, the place the household later lived. A disco platform boot in black and gold takes the place of the winding tower at Bergwerk II. It stands on a two-storey block of froth and chipboard lined by a metallic plate and a small bourgeois carpet. This mine additionally has a winding shaft inside, however there isn’t any black gold right here, solely macaroni.

The Sozialkistentransporter (‘Transporter for Social Packing containers’) from 1989 is a reproduction of a Venetian gondola. As an alternative, being a romantic car for lovers, it transports the framework of a big crate. In German colloquial language exists is the time period ‘Beziehungskiste,’ which may actually be translated right into a ‘relation field’ and means a challenged or troubled relationship. The phrases ‘social’ and ‘pasta’ dangle from the body rails of the ‘clear’ cargo, as in the event that they knew the recipe for the suitable melange of this ‘social pasta’.
As well as, there’s a signal with ‘Monkey Enterprise’, this might trace to the truth that any relationship can be a monkey enterprise—a difficult enterprise irrespective of how a lot we want to imagine into the kitsch and romantic happily-ever-after model.

at Galerie Gisela Capitain
till March 18, 2023