Ohne Titel

In 1996, Martin Kippenberger, a leading figure in the new German painting of the 1980s, painted a series that he dubbed Window Shopping Until 2 a.m., which proved to be one of his last. Conceived for an exhibition at his gallery in Vienna, the paintings consist of portraits, sometimes half-naked, fragments of bodies, and a self-portrait of the artist in a colourful kimono. 

Kippenberger found the motifs on slides taken by his girlfriend Elfie Semotan, a fashion photographer, who had just completed a series about flowery clothing for a magazine. The piercing gaze, the cross-dressing, the strange deformation of the artist’s body and his hypertrophic head make this painting an odd world of its own—a unique and irreverently celebrated medium