Untitled (Hotel Restaurant Goldener Adler)

In the last ten years of his life, from 1987–1997, German artist Martin Kippenberger created hundreds of drawings on hotel stationery, which he collected during his travels through a high-profile circuit of international exhibitions. During this period, such stationery became the artist’s primary drawing paper. These “hotel drawings,” sometimes referred to as an “autobiography in sketches,” range from crude doodles to finely-finished works. The alternately frenetic and inspired energy of the “hotel drawings” speaks to broader impressions of Kippenberger as an excitable and often outrageous public figure, continually at play with conventions of expressionism.

This untitled work addresses one of Kippenberger’s central subjects: the role of the artist in contemporary society, with himself as the prime example. He incorporated the stationery’s graphics into this composition by transforming a band across the top of the paper into the beam of a cross, beneath which Kippenberger depicts himself stretching towards the cross. His contorted expression, the implied crucifixion, and the words gemalt (painted) near his head, and the inverted mannlich (manly) across the center of the image—align this work with others in which he used pathos and humor to simultaneously embrace and skewer the Romantic view of the artist as a tortured genius.