Martin Kippenberger

In his fourth one-person exhibition at Metro Pictures, the German artist Martin Kippenberger will show new works of sculpture, photographs and paintings. The show opens on March 7 and runs through April 4, 1992.

Martin Kippenberger, well-known for his far-reaching art activities, again adopts all kinds of mediums and techniques, simulating the uniqueness of a "successful artwork" while transgressing the orthodox modernist aesthetic. His ubiquitous art includes more than 75 publications, 100 exhibitions, poster designs, T-Shirts and records; everything becomes art through his expansive performance.

The centerpiece of this installation is Dumpster, containing detritus from more than 15 paintings which were executed in 1990 and destroyed after being reproduced as photographs in the same dimensions as their painting models. Less a critique of a particular medium, these discarded relics are not reliant upon the photographs but rather preserved as another option in Kippenberger's restless art production. In fact, Kippenberger expands his contextual network, integrating disparate cultural information in order to provoke short-circuits of reasonable understanding. In Carousel with Ejection Seat the pilot seat rotates around its own axis suggesting the perfect panorama. Watchtower similarly offers the possibility of controlling surrounding phenomena as in Kippenberger's reconstruction of a forest of birch trees. Rather than inventing "new" pictures, Kippenberger assembles meaningless stereotypes into cryptic allegories.

Kippenberger's most recent museum show was at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco in 1991. His work has been widely exhibited in galleries and museums in Cologne, Nice, Japan, Los Angeles etc. Currently he is a professor at the art academies in Frankfurt and Kassel.