Martin Kippenberger
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. 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.
If you own a work by Martin Kippenberger
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
Write to info@whitebankfineart.co.uk, or start below.
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.