Untitled (Somateio Zoofilon)

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.

In Untitled (Somateio Zoofilon) – which bears the intriguing logo of an Athens-based animal welfare society – Kippenberger depicts a cartoonish jester in candy-coloured hues. He sports a ruff, an oversized nose, and a hat with a bell; in place of his left hand is a smiling crocodile. The clown is an apt tragicomic avatar for Kippenberger himself, who costumed his persona in many guises over the years. Like the jokes of a Shakespearean fool, his trickery, humour and hard-living antics had a keen satirical bite. ‘It may sound hackneyed to say that Kippenberger’s life was an extended, alcohol-fuelled performance piece,’ writes Roberta Smith, ‘but in a sense it was – at once self-indulgent, self-destructive and, oddly, selfless, almost self-sacrificing. He enacted the artistic drive in the extreme, flirted consistently with failure, and in his manic, exaggerated, remorseless way, exposed the human vulnerability behind all great art’ (R. Smith, ‘Ruling the Roost: The Artist Martin Kippenberger Through the Eyes of His Sister’, New York Times, 17 February 2012).