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21/11/2003

Nach Kippenberger

Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven

Nach Kippenberger in the Van Abbemuseum presents a wide-ranging retrospective of the work of the German artist Martin Kippenberger (1953-1997), whose life was all too short. Over 150 exhibits from the period 1977 to 1997 - paintings, drawings, photography, sculpture and large-scale spatial installations - give a sense of the huge productivity of an extraordinary artistic persona. The exhibition title - Nach Kippenberger - plays with the different implications of the word nach. Most commonly used to mean 'after', it points to the retrospective nature of the exhibition but, in view of its subsidiary meanings - 'according to' and 'towards' - it also implies an approach that leads to the artist and his work.

During his lifetime Martin Kippenberger adopted many roles. He was active not only as painter, sculptor and master builder but also as promoter, exhibitions maker and museum director. He unsettled the public with his belligerent strategies and his spontaneous - humorous to sarcastic - pictorial compositions. And he was never afraid to be embarrassing or insulting. Many still regard him today as a post-modern Bohemian, closely associated with the revival of interest in painting that occurred in the early 1980s.

Nach Kippenberger illuminates the conceptual aspect of his work, where the main issue is less a discourse on painting than the underlying artistic attitude. It seems that for Kippenberger the social utopias of the previous generation - Joseph Beuys, Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke - were all dreamt out. Kippenberger no longer subscribed to Beuys's maxim 'Everyone - each person - is an artist', preferring his own 'Every artist is a person.'

The selection of works has an architectural leitmotif. Built structures in paintings from the 1980s look mockingly back at history, Modernism and an unfettered belief in progress; feigned or real three-dimensional constructions postulate reference quantities that reflect his own 'I'. In the 1990s, the artist extended the spatial remit of his work and pursued his great utopian plan for a Metro Net World Connection to its logical extreme and further. For Kippenberger architectural structures were never just bodies, volumes and spaces, for they were always also places - at times occupied - in and with which he could consider his own artistic existence in this world.

The exhibition Nach Kippenberger was organised in collaboration with the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien.

Van Abbemuseum
Bilderdijklaan 10 Eindhoven
The Netherlands
tel. +31 (0)40 238 10 00
fax +31 (0)40 246 06 80

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