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Heavy Burschi [Heavy Guy]
Heavy Burschi [Heavy Guy] (1991)
brings together many of the defining themes of Kippenberger’s practice,
both in terms of media and its process of production. Kippenberger
asked an assistant to make paintings based on images from all his
catalogues, but he was unsatisfied with the finished canvases. He
ordered all fifty-one paintings to be destroyed, but first had each
photographed, reprinted to its original size and framed, exhibiting
them together, with the remnants of the paintings in a skip, as
a single installation.
Kippenberger plays with the idea that an artist is an isolated individual
who makes autonomous objects. He frequently used assistants, but his decision
to destroy these paintings throws the question of authorship into sharp relief.
Even though the canvases were only produced on his instructions, they were
still the result of someone else’s labour, making their destruction a vivid
demonstration of the relations between employer and employee.
Kippenberger’s actions echo the heroic gestures of destruction and renewal
that run throughout Modernism, particularly in the work of post-war German
artists such as Joseph Beuys and Anselm Kiefer. With his familiar barbed irony,
however, Kippenberger’s gesture is anything but an affirmation of the redemptive
power of the artist. Heavy Burschi exposes the violence inherent in
acts of destruction, emptying the gesture of its heroic connotations of cultural,
political and spiritual rebirth. Instead of destroying the present to create
a new future, Kippenberger creates a feedback loop. He destroys the paintings
only to show copies of them, which then become yet another series of unique
works, transforming the pictures, in his own description, ‘into a kind of double
kitsch’.
Texts by Jessica Morgan, Ben Borthwick and Craig Burnett
Untitled 1989/90 (from the series Heavy Burschi / Heavy Guy) Private Collection
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Untitled 1989/90 (from the series Heavy Burschi / Heavy Guy)
Private Collection
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Untitled 989/90 (from the series Heavy Burschi / Heavy Guy) Private Collection
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Untitled 1989/90 (from the series Heavy Burschi / Heavy Guy) Private Collection
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Untitled 1989/90 (from the series Heavy Burschi / Heavy Guy) Private Collection
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Untitled 1989/90 (from the series Heavy Burschi / Heavy Guy) Private Collection
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 Peter 1990 Private Collection
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