Curated by Doris Krystof and Jessica Morgan
Martin’s back! The massive Tate Modern is making room for the colossal Martin Kippenberger in a retrospective of more than two hundred works. Touchingly, The Happy End of Franz Kafka’s “Amerika”, 1994, provides the show’s center of gravity; Kafka’s epic, like Kippenberger’s retrospective, appeared posthumously. Although getting a grip on the artist’s dizzying productivity can be like trying to grasp escaping butane, retrospectives decelerate the blur of life, making an oeuvre more legible. You even feel Kippenberger’s breath in the catalogue essay his sister Susanne has written on, among other things, the playhouse the young artists called Martinsklause. Now, Tate Modern is Martinsklause II.
Travels to K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, June 10–Sept. 16.
