Martin Kippenberger

Martin Kippenberger's tragic premature death in 1997 removed from the world one of the great artistic talents of his generation. The consummate artist of his times, he moved effortlessly between a large variety of mediums, all of which were given equal importance, in order to attempt to portray his complex view of the world. By its many turns deeply intellectual, consciously provocative and cheekily evasive, Martin Kippenberger's multifaceted art was deliberately pre-occupied with the mechanics of style in society as a reference to society itself. Coming to prominence in the early 1980s, Kippenberger became one of the initiators of the so-called "wild painting" movement. Contesting the pre-dominant Neo-Expressionist belief in the meaningfulness of the spontaneous action of painting, Kippenberger developed an elaborate concept of aesthetics based on bad taste, where the trivial and the subcultural became as influential on his working practice as the masterpieces of art history. In his ongoing de-construction of accepted, fixed positions in art, Kippenberger's development of emphatically "banal" subjects in his oeuvre allowed him to pursue a programmatic and inter-contextual "stylelessness". Often sparked off by the resoundingly normal in life, for Kippenberger there was no subject which could not be turned into art.

With the Copa series, Kipperberger was to demonstrate his talents at their best.  Using expressive brushwork and a variety of mediums including acrylic paint, silicon and resin the three canvases were to appear as a highlight in Kippenberger's solo exhibition The Magical Misery Tour, Brazil in New York in 2004.  Displaying their trademark cardboard frames around each edge, the rich texture, bold colour and immediate gesture of the surface of each work radiates out towards the viewer.  Inspired by his time spent in Brazil during the mid-Eighties the scraps of cardboard, vibrant colours, and raw urban undertones of the present work are geniously conveyed.  Seeking out the subway entrances and exits of Brazil, and the modernist architecture of downtown Rio, elements of this new environment was to resurface in Kippenberger's Copa works, with the present triptych being one of the strongest and most impressive examples.