Untitled (Chateau de Marçay)

Martin Kippenberger’s ‘Hotel Drawings’, which he created throughout the final decade of his life, form a key part of his diverse and prolific creative output. These deft, intimate and witty drawings on hotel stationery blur the lines between life and art, between reality and performance, and even between individual works in Kippenberger’s oeuvre. Offering a vivid insight into the artist’s imagination, they form a travel diary of sorts, mingling fiction with fact: while Kippenberger stayed in many of the hotels whose letterheads he used, he also acquired notepaper from places he had never visited.

Untitled (Château de Marçay) is drawn on paper from a genteel hotel in France’s Loire Valley. In sepia tones, Kippenberger depicts a man gleefully fumigating the head of his seated companion. The caption Osnabrück 18 April: Kampf den Läusen reveals that what’s occurring is a battle with headlice, and seemingly refutes any link with France – Osnabrück is a city in northwest Germany. Kippenberger has also stamped the work with the cursive title The Happy End of Franz Kafka’s ‘America’, the name of a major installation that he had created the previous year. The work consisted of dozens of different tables and chairs, forming an imagined arena for mass job interviews based on a scene from Kafka’s unfinished novel. Beyond preparatory sketches, Kippenberger often made drawings during or after his large projects and sculptures: the present work can be seen both as a standalone work and as a fragment of a wider ongoing narrative.