Kippenberger: Through Puberty Towards Success
This artist’s book—the back of which bears the following quote from Rudolf Augstein: “Kippi can’t even make a sausage sandwich!”—opens with a dedication: “For papa (mummy issues) from whom I supposedly got my daddy issues + for all those I meet on the way up, because I’ll meet them again on the way back down.” Both say a great deal about this artist whose first major solo show was organized at the nGbK by RealismusStudio in 1981 under the title Lieber Maler male mir … (Dear painter, paint me …). The book launch was held before the exhibition opening at the Paris Bar in Berlin, which had commissioned professional poster painter Götz Valien to paint Kippenberger in oils. In her introduction, Barbara Straka deals briefly with this approach of “ironizing reality by declaring everyday banalities to be art.” The rest of the book consists of personal postcards and greetings addressed to the artist, poems, text/image collages, as well as absurd snippets and comments ranging from “demonstration of a horse barfing into a bag” through “pasta curtain in preparation.”

Ed.: nGbK

Work group: Valdis J. Āboliņš, Dieter Herrmann, Christa Kirchner, Udo Ropohl, Barbara Straka, Ernst Volland

With contributions by: Martin Kippenberger, Barbara Straka, among others