Martin Kippenberger Untitled. 1983

Acrylic on canvas. 50 × 60,5 cm (19 ⅝ × 23 ⅞ in.). Monogrammed on the stretcher in pencil: M. K. The painting is registered in the artist’s estate, Cologne. [3149] Framed, Acrylic on canvas. 50 × 60,5 cm (19 ⅝ × 23 ⅞ in.). Monogrammed on the stretcher in pencil: M. K. The painting is registered in the artist’s estate, Cologne. [3149] Framed, Private Collection, North Rhine-Westphalia (gifted by the artist to Walter Dahn; thence by descent to the present owner), Private Collection, North Rhine-Westphalia (gifted by the artist to Walter Dahn; thence by descent to the present owner), Catalogue raisonné: Not in Franzen/Capitain (2023), Martin paints Walter... At first glance, the subject is clearly sport. Football, to be precise. The red, scrawled lettering across Martin Kippenberger’s painting “Untitled” makes that clear. Gelsenkirchen–Buer sounds like a fixture in one of the lower divisions, apparently with an unfortunate outcome. The injured man, lying on a bed in his underpants with his heavily bandaged leg in plaster stretched out before him, has taken too many risks. A hero of some regional league somewhere in the Ruhr, where everyone plays with relish and a certain degree of aggression. The portrait Martin Kippenberger painted of Walter Dahn in 1982 is a special, rare image. On the one hand, it is as immediate as a snapshot, as though a teammate visiting him in hospital had taken a Polaroid, with the injury firmly in focus. Yet because the artist Martin Kippenberger depicts his fellow artist and friend Walter Dahn, the painting belongs to the genre of the friendship portrait. If portraiture is the highest discipline of painting, the friendship portrait takes it to another level. So much is at stake: connection, affection and shared experience. And always, too, virtuosity, cleverness and a profound familiarity with art history. Rivalry is also part of the equation, never to be discounted. The way sheets, canvas, cotton jersey and plaster bandages come together with skin, sinews, soft flesh and stubble is considerably more complex. The affinity with Édouard Manet’s “Olympia” and Gustave Courbet’s “The Origin of the World” is unmistakable: two canonical works whose subjects caused a scandal. Excessive intimacy and unabashed promiscuity in the first, shocking corporeality in the second, along with a certain reduction to essentials. The fact that a young man is laid out here like a muse in nineteenth-century France also turns things on their head. It brings to mind Lucian Freud and his variations on legs, dog paws, tails, hair, pink flesh, the black of dogs’ noses and breasts veined with blue, which the British painter spread across mattresses covered in white linen in every conceivable shade. Martin Kippenberger’s bed scene shares none of this particular palette. Walter Dahn is captured on the sheet in a scene that is unmistakably erotic, yet also exhausted, battered and immobilised. Martin Kippenberger rules over the canvas with his brush. Is there a final score to report, marked in red? Certainly not. For even the place names introduce another layer of wordplay and allusion. Buer and Gelsenkirchen are not football clubs but a district and a city: the area where the Ruhr region’s great traditional club, Schalke 04, has its stadium. Of course, Walter Dahn never played for Schalke. He had merely been kicking a ball around with a few friends when he tore his meniscus. The irony of the red lettering makes this abundantly clear. Nothing worth mentioning. And it hardly matters what Walter Dahn looks like, portrayed as he is without a head. Martin paints Walter: there is an undercurrent of eroticism, and the many scandalous moments settle into the folds of the sheet, finding expression in the tautly stretched jersey and the muscles encased in plaster. Two painters in the tournament, yes. But also a tremendous, shocking intimacy that envelops everything. Catrin Lorch

Estimation:€60,000

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