Martin Kippenberger never kept the art and its packaging apart. He made posters for his own shows, printed books and catalogues by the dozen, drew on the letterheads of the hotels he stayed in, and in 1981 paid a commercial sign painter to make a series of paintings that went out under his name. MoMA’s 2009 retrospective listed posters, announcement cards, books and music alongside the paintings and sculpture, which says a lot about where the weight of his practice sits. For anyone who designs identities, invitations or exhibition graphics, his work is an argument that the support material is never neutral.
A note on images: none of the Martin Kippenberger works held by the Art Institute of Chicago is flagged public domain, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Cleveland Museum of Art have no public-domain works by him, so this guide describes his work in text only. For historic posters that are cleared for reuse, browse the poster collection in the MGD museum inspiration collection.
Who was Martin Kippenberger?
He was born in Dortmund on 25 February 1953 and died in Vienna on 7 March 1997, according to the Städel Museum’s collection record and the New York Times obituary by Roberta Smith. He studied at the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Hamburg, as MoMA’s exhibition text notes; the school is where Sigmar Polke taught from the 1970s, and Polke’s print-based irony is a useful companion to Kippenberger’s.
After a stay in Florence, he moved to Berlin and in 1978 set up Kippenbergers Büro (Kippenberger’s Office) with Gisela Capitain, an “office” that organised shows for himself and his friends. Artforum and the LBBW collection both describe his role at the same time in SO36, the Kreuzberg punk venue, though they differ on whether he was manager or co-owner. In the 1980s he worked mainly from Cologne.
A career in key works
Lieber Maler, male mir (Dear Painter, Paint for Me), 1981. Kippenberger gave photographs to a commercial poster painter and had him paint large canvases from them. Tate’s 2006 press release cites the series as an example of his delegating painting to others, and a Christie’s note places its debut at the Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst in Berlin in 1981.
The Problem Perspective, 1986. A text-based painting whose title MOCA Los Angeles and MoMA borrowed for their 2008–09 retrospective. The phrase works like a slogan, and the picture is mostly lettering.
Paintings in the Art Institute of Chicago. The AIC holds Betty Ford Clinic (Betty Ford Klinik) (1985), oil and lacquer on canvas, and Good Price (Preisgünstig) (1994), oil on canvas. The titles alone show how often he lifted his words from signage, brands and headlines.
Street Lamp for Drunks (Laterne an Betrunkene), 1988. A street lamp bent out of the vertical, as if leaning on a wall. Accounts from the LBBW collection and others tie it to a year he spent in Seville and Madrid, and the lamp became a motif he repeated in later works.
Hotel drawings, 1987–97. In the last decade of his life he drew on stationery collected from hotels on the exhibition circuit, and that paper became his main drawing surface, as the Art Institute of Chicago’s catalogue entry and the Smart Museum’s 2000 exhibition both describe. The AIC holds a large group, with titles that simply name the hotel: Untitled (Hotel Savoy) (1991), Untitled (Tokyo Hilton) (1992), Untitled (Anchorage Hotel Alaska) (1995).
Metro-Net, 1993–97. A fictional worldwide subway system made of entrances that lead nowhere. The first was built in 1993 on the Greek island of Syros, where he had also set up a makeshift museum; another stood in the German pavilion at the 2003 Venice Biennale, where he was shown alongside Candida Höfer. Sources count six or seven entrances.
The Happy End of Franz Kafka’s “Amerika”, 1994. A room-sized installation of tables and chairs staged as a vast job interview. Museum Folkwang showed it again in 2021.
The Raft of the Medusa, 1996. His wife, the photographer Elfie Semotan, photographed him copying the poses of figures in Théodore Géricault’s painting, as Tate’s display text records; the photographs fed a portfolio of lithographs and a series of paintings.
What to look at in a Martin Kippenberger work
The printed matter. In 2021 Villa Hügel in Essen showed around 120 of his books and about 140 posters made between 1979 and 1997, according to the museum’s press material. That is a body of graphic work in its own right. The posters often feature the artist himself, photographed in a pose or costume, with the show title set large and the venue information treated almost as an afterthought.
Titles as headlines. His titles are long, punning and often in German and English at once. On a poster or a canvas they behave like display type: they set the tone before you read the image.
The letterhead as a ready-made layout. Each hotel drawing starts with someone else’s design: a crest, a logotype, a printed address block, a coloured ground. He drew around it, through it and over it, so the hotel’s branding becomes the composition’s anchor. Media listed by the AIC include ballpoint, coloured pencil, transfer tape, collaged photographs and even fortune-cookie slips.
No house style. He switched styles freely, and the delegated paintings remove his hand altogether. Consistency comes from attitude and voice, not from a look.
Technique: delegation, repetition and the edition
- Commissioned hands. He hired a sign painter, assistants and friends to make parts of his work, and MoMA has described that use of collaborators as a challenge to the idea of the artist as sole author.
- Self-quotation. Motifs such as the bent lamp and the subway entrance return in different media, from sculpture to print to drawing, so a small set of symbols builds a recognisable world.
- Multiples and books. Catalogues, invitations and posters were made as carefully as unique works and were meant to circulate.
- Found paper. Hotel stationery gave him a fixed format, a supply that refreshed with every trip, and a built-in caption: the name of the place where the drawing was made.
How designers can borrow Martin Kippenberger’s ideas
- Design the announcement as the work. Treat a launch poster, invitation or social card as a piece with its own idea, not a container for the logo.
- Put a person on the poster. His posters often show himself in a staged photograph. A founder, a staff member or a customer in a deliberate pose can give a campaign a voice that stock imagery cannot. Our guide to poster design principles covers the hierarchy that keeps such images legible.
- Start from someone else’s layout. Draw or set type over a found letterhead, ticket or form. The existing grid and brand mark give the page structure, and the contrast between official print and your marks does the talking.
- Write titles that work as display type. A long, specific, slightly odd headline can carry a whole design. Set it big and let the image answer it.
- Build a recurring motif. Pick one simple object and redraw it across formats, from icon to signage to merchandise, the way the lamp and the subway entrance recur.
- Brief other makers. Commissioning a sign painter or illustrator to interpret your idea can push the result somewhere you would not have gone alone.
When you collect colours from your own found paper or posters, our image colour picker pulls a palette from a photograph. Kippenberger’s paintings, posters, books and drawings are in copyright, so borrow his methods and make your own material.
Where to see Martin Kippenberger’s work
The Art Institute of Chicago holds the paintings Betty Ford Clinic and Good Price and a substantial group of hotel drawings. Tate in London holds works including prints from the late 1990s, and MoMA, the Walker Art Center and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art also hold his work. Major retrospectives include Tate Modern in 2006, which travelled to K21 in Düsseldorf, and MOCA Los Angeles in 2008, which travelled to MoMA in 2009, billed there as his first major US retrospective.
Frequently asked questions
What is Martin Kippenberger known for?
He is known for working across painting, sculpture, installation, books and posters, for the hotel-stationery drawings of 1987–97, for the Metro-Net subway entrances, and for delegated works such as Lieber Maler, male mir (1981).
What are Kippenberger’s hotel drawings?
They are drawings and collages made on letterhead collected from hotels during his travels in the last ten years of his life. The printed hotel name, crest and address are part of each composition.
Did Martin Kippenberger design his own posters?
He made posters for many of his exhibitions, often featuring staged photographs of himself, and treated them as part of his work. Villa Hügel’s 2021 exhibition showed about 140 of them alongside around 120 of his books.
Can I use Martin Kippenberger’s work in my designs?
No. He died in 1997 and his works are in copyright. You can learn from his methods, such as designing the announcement as the artwork, drawing over found stationery and commissioning other makers, but create your own images.
