RICHARD ARTSCHWAGER | MARTIN KIPPENBERGER: Drawings and Objects

David Nolan Gallery is pleased to present a two-person exhibition of works by Richard Artschwager and Martin Kippenberger. Bringing together significant examples of sculpture, drawing, and painting, the exhibition sets these two pioneers into playful dialogue.

The works by Richard Artschwager (American, 1923-2013) range in date from 1974 to 2011, beginning with a ghostly drawing entitled Door Window Table Basket Mirror Rug #10 and ending with a late painting – Landscape with Median – in which a red road, marked with two bold yellow stripes, leads ambiguously into the middle-distance. Martin Kippenberger (German, 1953-1997) is represented by works from 1985 to 1996 – the same years he undertook his famous series of drawings on hotel stationary. The group of “hotel drawings” in the present exhibition hint at the manifold expressions in Kippenberger’s work, as well as his relentless disavowal of any single stylistic approach. Various sculptures in the exhibition – such as Kippenberger’s Kippenblinky (1991) and Artschwager’s Leaning Chair (2010) – show how both artists confound our expectations of “everyday” objects (in these instances, a lamp and a chair), elevating the ordinary into the realm of the humorous and the profound. 

Richard Artschwager was born in 1923 in Washington, D.C. He died at age 89 in 2013, less than a week after the closing of his second retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. His work can be found in numerous public collections including The Art Institute of Chicago, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Tate Modern, London. Artschwager has been the subject of eight solo exhibitions at David Nolan Gallery since 1993.

Martin Kippenberger was born in Dortmund, Germany in 1953 and he died in 1997 at the age of 44. His work has been the focus of major retrospectives including Martin Kippenberger: The Problem Perspective, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, as well as Martin Kippenberger at the Tate Modern, London and K21, Düsseldorf. Between 1989 and 2000 David Nolan Gallery presented five solo exhibitions with the artist.