Martin Kippenberger valuation
Made bad painting deliberately, ran a nightclub, and produced more in forty-four years than most do in eighty.
Martin Kippenberger was born at Dortmund in 1953 and worked at a rate and a range that make him hard to summarise: paintings, sculpture, posters, invitation cards, books, installations, hotel drawings made on stationery, the Metro-Net subway entrances built in Greece and Canada leading nowhere, and the self-portraits in outsized underpants after Picasso.
What a work by Martin Kippenberger is worth
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Bio
Martin Kippenberger was born at Dortmund in 1953 and worked at a rate and a range that make him hard to summarise: paintings, sculpture, posters, invitation cards, books, installations, hotel drawings made on stationery, the Metro-Net subway entrances built in Greece and Canada leading nowhere, and the self-portraits in outsized underpants after Picasso. He managed the Berlin punk club SO36, employed other people to paint pictures he had commissioned, and treated the exhibition, the catalogue and his own persona as material. He drank heavily and died in 1997, at forty-four, since when his standing has risen steadily.
The breadth is the problem and the opportunity: the same name covers unique paintings, editioned multiples in large numbers, printed ephemera that was made to be given away, and works produced by assistants at his instruction, and these are entirely different objects commercially. Establishing which category a piece falls into, and whether it is unique or one of many, is the first step and is not always obvious from the object. The Estate of Martin Kippenberger, through Galerie Gisela Capitain, is the reference. Catalogues raisonnes exist for several bodies of work.
At a glance
- Born
- 25 February 1953, Dortmund
- Died
- 7 March 1997, Vienna
- Movements
- Abstract art, Mail art
More on Wikipedia.
Cologne, Venice and the retrospectives
Kippenberger had his first solo show in Florence in 1977 and settled in Berlin the next year. In Cologne in the 1980s he was closely involved with Max Hetzler's gallery, and his first museum exhibition was at the Hessisches Landesmuseum in Darmstadt in 1986. Laterne an Betrunkene (Street Lamp for Drunks) was shown at the Venice Biennale in 1988, and in his last years he taught at the Städelschule in Frankfurt and in Kassel.
He died of liver cancer in Vienna in March 1997. He represented Germany at the Venice Biennale in 2003, Tate Modern gave him a retrospective in 2006, and The Problem Perspective opened in Los Angeles in 2008 before travelling to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The hotel drawings, made on hotel letterheads from 1987 until his death, are a large and distinct body of work, and the letterhead helps to place each one.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
