FRANKFURT, GERMANY.- Städel Museum presents Martin Kippenberger: Work until it's all sorted out – Pictures, 1984/85, on view through March 4, 2007. For the first time, thanks to the generous donation by the Frankfurt Trade Fair, the Staedel Museum now possesses a work by Martin Kippenberger (1953–1997), one of the most versatile and eagerly experimental artists of the late 20th century. We would like to honour this donation with an exhibition of six pictures by Kippenberger in the museum‘s Kuppelsaal. In the years 1984/85, “Two Proletarian Women Inventors on their Way to the Inventors‘ Congress” was painted as part of a group of ironical and provocative pictures that derived their themes from the pictorial world of communism. The paintings represent a German artist looking back, from a 1980s perspective, at the period when Russia was undergoing a new awakening. The ideology of work, the self-liberation of the proletariat, and collective living were catch-phrases that Kippenberger pointedly picked up on in a close-knit, pseudo-futuristic and also pseudo-constructivist verbal and visual language.

His attitude is one of resignation, reflecting the course of history and the presence of the Cold War. Yet this ever-restless artist is not concerned with apportioning blame or being in the right. On the contrary, he points out the simple truth that dealing with the traps and trickery of this world is something that has to be learned, and that life itself, in all its banality, is hidden behind all those symbolic layers of meaning.

The selection of paintings on display demonstrates the greatness of Kippenberger‘s attempt to interlink truth and falsehood on the one hand with documentary visual reporting and pure fiction on the other. The artist embeds himself deeply in his chosen landscape of ideas and motifs in order to comment on it from the inside out – and here he is expecting a response from the public, because talking about things over and over again has always been one of the overriding features of Kippenberger‘s oeuvre.