Martin Kippenberger

Galerie Mikael Andersen, Copenhagen
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Rotterdam, Museum Bojimans Van Beuningen, The Happy End of Franz Kafka's 'America', 1994, pl. 314, illustrated (in the artist's studio), pl. 315, illustrated
Copenhagen, Galerie Mikael Andersen, Martin Kippenberger, Please Don't Sit on the Paintings, 1996

Exhibition Catalogue, Los Angeles, The Museum of Contemporary Art; New York, The Museum of Modern Art, Martin Kippenberger: The Problem Perspective, 2008-09, p. 284, illustrated in colour (in the artist's studio)

The colours in the catalogue illustration are accurate. This work is in very good condition. There is very light and minor wear to the tips of the bottom corners.
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Martin Kippenberger's paintings Stuhl (Tisch) and Tisch of 1994 are very significant reference points in the late work of this most provocative, rebellious and non-conformist of artists. Due to his tragically early death from cancer aged just 44 in 1997 these works are rare vestiges of a short but brilliant career that effected key advancements in Post Modernism. These two paintings are inextricably related to what is widely considered to be the definitive masterpiece of the artist's oeuvre: The Happy End of Franz Kafka's 'Amerika', which, after three years of work, was also completed in 1994. Kippenberger's magnum opus consists of a monumental installation that occupies twenty by thirty metres and includes about fifty tables and twice as many chairs. It is inspired by a passage of Kafka's novel in which the hero, having travelled the breadth of America, applies for a job advertised as "Whoever wants to become an artist should sign up!" As Kafka did not complete the story it is possible to hypothesise a happy ending: albeit a highly atypical eventuality within the writer's canon.  Although Kippenberger famously never finished reading the book, rather being told the story by a friend, his colossal installation transforms Kafka's concept of the job interview into a fixed state of permanent interview, while also satirizing the notion that all artists function in a permanent state of interview with their audience. The enormous diversity of objects and furniture not only chronicles the history of twentieth-century design, but also stands as metaphor for a wide spectrum of personalities and psychological types. As described by the artist, it is a highly complex work that affords a multitude of interpretation and reaction: "In The Happy End of Franz Kafka's 'Amerika' it is the different decades; everybody certainly remembers one of the chairs, which embodies for you this or that, and you are back in that time, it's like a visual reference book...Suddenly you have different ideas and can tell yourself a story" (the artist cited in: Exhibition Catalogue, Hamburg, Deichtorhallen, Martin Kippenberger: The Happy End of Franz Kafka's 'Amerika', 1999, p. 65).

Stuhl (Tisch) and Tisch represent the painterly equivalent to The Happy End of Franz Kafka's 'Amerika': setting in oil paint on canvas the conceptual kernel of the interview theme. As paintings they also evoke a wide raft of art historical precedent, from the still-life subject matter of Van Gogh's Chair of 1888 in the National Gallery, London, to the Surrealist inversion of categorisation epitomised by Magritte's declaration that 'Ceci n'est pas une pipe' in The Treachery of Images of 1929 in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Kippenberger's paintings also reference his eminent fellow-German Gerhard Richter and that artist's iconic canvas Tisch of 1962, which is number 1 in his self-edited catalogue raisonné, as well as his later series of Stuhl paintings of 1965 that depict kitchen chairs and are numbered 97, 98, and 99. The present two works are exactly typical of Kippenberger's lifelong rejection of classification, and the apparently impersonal execution of mundane subjects in fact exemplifies his most radical reinvention of artistic communication, as described by Zdenek Felix: "he used his irony and his bias for a permanent deconstruction of fixed positions with regard to content and style in order to counteract some of his contemporaries' naïve beliefs in the meaningfulness of the spontaneous action of painting" (Ibid.).