Martin Kippenberger

JE SUIS MÉDUSE. I am Medusa. These words hover, graffiti-like, in a speech bubble on the choppy blood-red ground seething through the chaotic central painting of Martin Kippenberger’s causa mortis series “The Raft of the Medusa,” 1996. It is here—in this layered, macabre scene—that Kippenberger depicts his own figure modeled after each dead, dying, or deranged crew member of the wrecked ship Medusa immortalized in Théodore Géricault’s 1819 epic painting. Inspired by the French masterpiece, Kippenberger feverishly produced a series of forty-nine paintings, drawings, lithographs, and even a rug printed with the image of the raft itself, all during the year before his death. Displayed together for the first time in the US, they show the kaleidoscopic nature of the artist’s tragicomic brilliance.

A robust grouping, the paintings are as psychologically multivalent as the series itself. Compartmentalized by geometric blocks of color, these self-portraits externalize what is perhaps an effort at order amid entropy. Yet Kippenberger’s unbridled treatment of paint—thinly layered, violent scratches that carve out a gaping mouth or armpit or, in other places, thick, toothpaste-like scrolls that engorge figuration—implies a heated reckoning with fate; and comic moments, such as cartoon-like ocean waves, jest at death itself. On a final lithograph, Kippenberger scrawled THE END as though sardonically turning the page of a fable.

Taken by his wife, the accompanying photographs of the late artist are haunting, bringing to light his embodying process. In each of them, Kippenberger is pictured assuming various positions, imitating Géricault’s deserted men and their uniquely splayed bodies. Though the word myth often buoys Kippenberger’s name, here it is unveiled: The Medusa’s delirious reincarnation plays perfect artifice for Kippenberger’s looming mortality that was plagued by corporeal extremes. Je suis Méduse, or better, I am Kippenberger—excess, ruin, The End.