The artist who drank too much beer
“Alcohol torture”, multiple by Martin Kippenberger
Source: Grit Hesse / Christian Hesse Auctions; Montage: Infographic WORLD
The artist Martin Kippenberger was a prisoner of the popular drug alcohol. And fell victim to her early on. His tendency towards self-irony survived in the editions that he created in small numbers.
Altbier is a specialty of the Rhineland and Westphalia. It comes in red-brown tones and is usually drunk from squat, cylindrical beakers – or straight from the can. Martin Kippenberger (1953 to 1997) was a regular in the eighties in the punk shed “Ratinger Hof” in Düsseldorf’s old town and will have drunk one or two old castles there.
Overall, he liked to drink, but doesn’t seem to have been a gourmet either. “Anything pretentious,” wrote Susanne Kippenberger in her biography regarding her brother, “was alien to him, when the waiter held out the cork of an expensive red wine to sniff, he stuck it in his eye.”
The beer can is the antithesis of fancy cocktails and complex wines. You tear them open, drink them and throw them away. Beer cans are semantically linked to the proletariat and subculture. Kippenberger’s multiple “Alcohol Torture” (beer can, plastic, adhesive plaster, 1989, monogrammed, dated and numbered, estimate 750 euros) also appears artless at first glance.
A plaster with an initial and number is on the sheet of paper, the middle of the original three cans has not been touched. According to the auction house Christian Hesse, it is where the object is in the Online auction of modern art is being auctioned for the gift of Kippenberger to a Hamburg gallery owner.
Some may know the painting “Alcohol Torture” from 1981/82. In the self-portrait, the artist wears the empty silicone rings around his wrists and holds them out to the viewer like a handcuff – Martin Kippenberger, a prisoner of the popular drug ethanol.
In comparison, the multiple seems even more radical – it is a work that only gains its value in the interplay of references, language and the artist’s biography. The fact that the auctioneer Christian Hesse is offering them right now fits like a fist – many have a dry month in January. So you can buy a beer that you are guaranteed not to drink.
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