Martin Kippenberger

Painter Christopher Wool has written, "Some of the best stand-up performance I ever saw was Martin Kippenberger] telling jokes in the back of some bar or restaurant." Which is not to dismiss the legendary German artist, who was at the forefront of the much-storied Cologne art scene of the early 1990s--Kippenberger, who died in 1997, used humor like a laser, to illuminate power structures and taboos. One of the most important artists of the twentieth century, he not only worked in a variety of media--painting, sculpture, books and multiples--but, taking a cue from Joseph Beuys, actively tried to conceive new possibilities on which to model an art practice. This volume, published for an exhibition at Austria's acclaimed Kunsthaus Graz, includes incisive essays by curator and critic Daniel Birnbaum and linguist and writer Martin Prinzhorn, which examine the softer, more utopian side of the artist.