Kippenberger emerged following a previous generation of extraordinary artists who were active in the German cities of Cologne and Düsseldorf in the 1960s and 1970s, such as Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Blinky Palermo and Jörg Immendorff, Joseph Beuys among others. He was, nonetheless, one of the most prolific artists of his generation, producing an extraordinary amount of paintings, sculptures, objects, multiples, as well as an exceptional output of photographs, posters, invitations, records and other objects. Albert Oehlen, his friend and collaborator on numerous projects, stated: “He loves art like nobody else, I think that is why he is able to do 90 exhibitions, because he has the need to work all the time.”
Lived intensely without ever considering the price he had to pay in terms of his health as well as his relationship with friends, art dealers, colleagues, institutions and the press. In the 1990s, he produced an exhibition per month on average! And perhaps this creative voracity was also the reason why museums took longer to absorb his work. Kippenberger produced works that, as was the case with Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons, perfectly fit the world of commercial art galleries: his work exposes the artistic production process, the market and the art world in its broadest sense, as a network of interrelated structures.
A final anecdote: once Kippenberger found various copies of the book Les Memoires d’un Cordon Bleu at a used book store in Paris. He decided to buy them all, and proceeded to number and sign them all, transforming them into his work. Joseph Beuys, who admired Kippenberger’s spontaneity, answered by stamping and signing a series of the artist’s posters, turning them into an original Beuys.