Martin Kippenberger (1953-1997)
Artist's Resale Right ("Droit de Suite"). Artist's… Read more PROPERTY FROM AN IMPORTANT PRIVATE EUROPEAN COLLECTION
Martin Kippenberger (1953-1997)

Untitled

Details
Martin Kippenberger (1953-1997)
Untitled
signed with the artist's initials and dated 'M.K, 96' (lower right)
ballpoint pen, ink pen and wax crayon on hotel stationery
11 x 8½in. (28 x 21.5cm.)
Executed in 1996
Provenance
Gabriele Senn Galerie, Vienna.
Acquired from the above in 2000.
Exhibited
Vienna, Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Nach Kippenberger/After Kippenberger, 2003-2004 (illustrated in colour, p. 253). This exhibition later travelled to Eindhoven, Van Abbemuseum.
Special notice
Artist's Resale Right ("Droit de Suite"). Artist's Resale Right Regulations 2006 apply to this lot, the buyer agrees to pay us an amount equal to the resale royalty provided for in those Regulations, and we undertake to the buyer to pay such amount to the artist's collection agent.

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Alice de Roquemaurel
Alice de Roquemaurel

Lot Essay

Executed in 1996, Untitled offers a tender depiction of Kippenberger standing side by side with his daughter Helena. Born in 1988, Helena is depicted as a little girl, still clutching her father's hand. A bittersweet recollection, the work was carried out shortly before the artist's premature death. Carefully rendered, the work is replete with fine lines and washes of watercolour: vivid purple for the artist's coat and corn yellow for the child's hair. Captured on hotel stationary from the infamous Château Marmont on Sunset Boulevard, it reflects the artist's itinerant lifestyle, never settling in any one location for any great length of time. As his sister Susanne Kippenberger later recalled, 'near the end of his life, some six months before he died, Martin told a friend that Hamburg in general and Polke in particular had ruined him by giving him the idea of turning his own life into art; 'throwing one's physical, bodily existence onto the scales. We had to, back then, at the price of destroying ourselves.' But by then, in 1996, Martin felt that it was too late to change course' (S. Kippenberger, The Kippenberger Clan, New York 2011, n.p.).

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