Martin Kippenberger

Beginning in the late 70s, Martin Kippenberger conceived his work as a point of intersection between artistic contexts and circulating ideas. With his characteristic blend of refinement and extreme crudity, he left very few of the problems and methods of twentieth-century art untouched. Via a postmodernist disposition, one combining humor, direct reference, communicativeness and body politics, Kippenberger seized upon the central artistic questions of the late twentieth century like virtually no other artist of his generation, and translated them into complex structures of communications. This is a beautiful and excitingly designed monograph containing reproductions of paintings, works on paper, sculpture, photographs and installation work, as well as a very strong reading of Kippenberger's work by Manfred Hermes. All of the work reproduced here is in the collection of Friedrich Christian Flick, one of the best in-depth assemblages of contemporary art in the world.