Lacque des Hommes

‘It is certainly easy to regard Martin Kippenberger as one of the greatest performers and self-promoters among German artists of the 1980s and 1990s, but that will do him justice only in part. Yet even the attempt to describe Kippenberger’s cosmos in all its complexity will necessarily fail. Like no other, he embodies the image of the 'typical artist,’ unlike anyone does he live an inseparable symbiosis of life and art production – in all its intensity and with all its ramifications. His work, based on permanent introspection, does not shy away from failure, disruption and great risks, and still provides impulses and inspiration today. 

All of his works are self-portraits in the broadest sense; they say something about him, his life situation, his environment – even those that do not actually depict him. His art is complex, varied, autobiographical and self-reflexive; it appropriates, quotes and deconstructs before it constructs something new that refers back to whatever came before. For Kippenberger, relinquishing his authorship, or handwriting, is already from an early age a logical consequence of his thinking and acting, since it indeed opens up a wide range of possibilities – above all the establishment of his own reference system – within the art production. The radicalism that characterizes this approach unfolds a spectrum of options and calls into question everything that has existed thus far – originality, authorship, value, and also “postmodern knowledge.” Kippenberger performs this critique intuitively and even ventures beyond it: the one great narrative is abandoned in favor of many options'.

S. Kleine, ‘Cosmos Kippenberger’, in Martin Kippenberger: BITTESCHÖN DANKESCHÖN, exh. cat., Bonn: Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 2019, p. 27

One of the most respected painters today, Albert Oehlen (b. 1954) constantly questions the methods and means of painting to raise a sense of awareness of the medium, which he aims to reinvent and to reshape, always in opposition to traditional hierarchies. Albert Oehlen has been continually colliding various styles, orders or mediums since the 80’s, expanding the notion of painting to ‘what he wants to see’.

‘Albert Oehlen long ago constructed the possibility of his own painting. Yet at the beginning the road seemed not merely a narrow alley, it looked like a dead end. What then? Give up and turn back? Or take a hammer and drive a tunnel through the solid amorphous mass before him? Albert Oehlen was one of the very few to take up that hammer. And when he started he struck mighty blows. It was in materials, expression, history and genre – in everything his immediate predecessors had progressively demolished with their hammers – that Oehlen stated his determination not to give in. His possibility of painting had to be built from the foundations. No gratuitous transgressions, no irony or cynicism – even if it is true that some used these terms to disparage his efforts to be free of artistic propriety. Instead Oehlen went looking where nobody else did, plunging into the piles of detritus abandoned by the wayside of an era. Then a final task remained: that of interweaving painting as history with the position of the painter and with the society out of which both painting and painter emerge in order to reflect on it.’

A. Pontégnie, The history of abstraction seemed to be finished in Albert Oehlen, Galerie Max Hetzler and Holzwarth Publications, 2011