Stober Collection, Berlin
Galerie Folker Skulima, Berlin

Martin Kippenberger’s best work probes German history while simultaneously questioning the social function of art. Nowhere is this better expressed than in the present work, Untitled, from a cycle of large-scale paintings executed in 1991. Monumental in scale and aspiration, the present work is from a series of six paintings in this size which treat the motif of the Krieg böse – the German warship. Set against a background subdivided into four brightly coloured, lavishly painted quadrants, the menacing battleship intrudes on the composition. Thickly painted with broad swathes of grey and black, the Krieg böse sales upon a sea of vibrant colour, heavily laden with its cargo of foreboding and threat. Filling the right side of the composition, a giant oversized canary bird hovers inverted in spa꧒ce.

This seemingly unlikely and impenetrable juxtaposition of motifs is typical of Kippenberger’s recondite, witty and ironic approach to painting. In his iconoclastic vision, Kippenberger is here referencing the quintessentially German notion of Vergangenheitsbewältigung. Specifically, the term relates to the aim of liberal Germans in the post-war decades to deal with the guilt of recent history and the atrocities committed under the Third Reich. Conscious of the imperatives of learning from the past, the generation that grew out of the rubble of war faced crises of personal and national identity, specifically the accountability of the individual vis-à-vis t🌌hat of the state for a past that was beyond their control. In the 1960s and 1970s, this was characterised by the non-violent rebellion of the flower-power generation which spread across Europe. In the 1980s, however, while the need to disassociate oneself from past events was still urgently felt by young Germans, there was no established direction to follow, no movement to rally behind, no identity to claim.

In the present work, Kippenberger locates his ideas within the territories of shared German consciousness. The militaristic motif of the Krieg böse references German aggression, evocative of the Bismarck, the queen of the German Second World War flotilla, a commerce raider that was sent against Allied merchant shipping before it was sunk at Churchill’s behest in 1941. In Kippenberger’s hands, however, any sense of threat is dispersed by the incongruous green canary that offsets the composition. At the very centre of the composition, at the point where the coloured quadrants join, the implied violence of the ship’s artillery is diffused by its comic target of the canary’s tail feathers. On the one hand we have the gravitas of war, on the other the inanity of a lime green bird. This dichotomy plays with numerous binary oppositions: the destructiveness of man in the face of nature’s creation; the enormity and power of machines against the fragility of a songbird; the unleashed danger of warfare against the tame triviality of a caged domestic bird. In other works from the series, the canary is accompanied by a Santa-Claus figure, complete with his red Christmas outfit. Saint Nicholas, known among orthodox Christians for his secret gift giving, is also the patron saint of sailors and merchants. Kippenberger’s visual pun in Untitled is toও depict the saint of the sea in his more commonly recognisable guise of Santa Claus, the trite symbol of the commercial depravity of today’s society.

Kippenberger’s choice of avian imagery is particularly pertinent, given that the Adler, the eagle, is the adopted symbol of the German Republic. Inverted, it is also subversive: here the mighty eagle, the king of the skies, symbol of power and strength, is substituted with the trite image of the smallest and most ineffectual bird.  In avian symbolism, if the white dove connotes peace and the black raven is interpreted as the harbinger of an ill omen, Kippenberger here leaves us to puzzle over the significance of a lime green canary. This ironic irreverence is pure Kippenberger genius. Enlarged, the canary becomes fetishised and hyperbolic, belittling not the enormity of war, but rather probing the psyche of a disorientated generation. But as always with Kippenberger, the seriousness of his subject-matter is couched in irony and humour so that his argument, although provocative, is nonetheless tongue-in-cheek and delivered with caustic wit and aplomb. As Alison Gingeras states, “Kippenberger was political, but that was not his central thesis; it was just another set of rules to exploit. (Alison M. Gingeras, ‘Kippenbergiana: Avant-Garde Value in Contemporary Painting’ in M. Holbern, Ed., The Triumph of Painting, London 2005, p. 6)

While referencing his nation’s political history, Kippenberger also engages with his artistic heritage. The motif of the upside down bird cannot help but draw allusion to the inverted motifs of Georg Baselitz, particularly the Adler, and the Neo-Expressionist painters who were Kippenberger’s immediate forefathers. As Gregory Williams states: “From an art-world perspective, he takes a dig at German artists like Markus Lüpertz and Georg Baselitz, who denied that their militaristic motifs (boots, helmets, guns, eagles) were meant to be read as anything other than empty formal supports for the practice of painting. Kippenberger responds indirectly to the dubious claim by Baselitz that he sought to ‘create no anecdotal, descriptive pictures’. In doing so, Kippenberger conveys an unmistakable sense of comedic timing.” Gregory Williams, ‘Jokes Interrupted: Martin Kippenberger’s Receding Punch Line’ in Exhibition Catalogue, London, Tate Gallery, Martin Kippenberger, 2006, p. 46).

In Untitled, Kippenberger, through a process of encryption, constructs a parody of the zeitgeist of his age, as well as formally challenging the erudite pretensions of recent art history.  On the one hand controversial and provocative, his gorgeous handling of paint never loses sight of the primacy of visual appeal. Layering paint in the same way that he layers meaning, he combines a sometimes drippy application with spray-painted numerals and in the centre of the composition a rectangular area of varnish which leaps to the fore. Intelligent and subversive, Untitled is an undisputed masterpiece from Kippenber🧸ger’s radically heterogeneous oeuvre. It justifies his status both as enfant terrible of the 1980s ar𓆏t world and as the father of contemporary painting.