During his storied, 25-year career. Martin Kippenberger (1953-1997) assaulted and transformed the art world, casting himself as provocateur, jester, carouser, philosopher, musician, instructor and artist. He was one of the most important cultural figures of his generation, whose influence and impact has only increased since his death. Book jacket.

A selection of hotel stationery designed by Kippenberger.

On Kippenberger's utopian portals into an imaginary global transportation system In the early 1990s, Martin Kippenberger (1953-97) developed the idea of a global underground network: METRO-Net. Although it is one of the artist's most fascinating projects, his premature death in 1997 meant that it could only be implemented in rudimentary form. In 1993, a metro entrance was built on the Greek island of Syros, followed by two more: one in 1995, in Dawson City in Canada, and the other in 1997, on the new Leipzig exhibition grounds. These structures proposed a means of traveling in the boundless space of the imagination: without the willingness to visualize tunnel tubes and moving underground trains, this project remains a "nonsensical building plan." But the moment we accept the artwork as a mode of transport for "mind travelers," then the full power of this work unfolds. Documented in this volume, Kippenberger's METRO-Netwas intended to counter life's predictable, rationally oriented parameters with a romantic sense of the world.

An illuminating study of the work of artist Martin Kippenberger, whose art expressed the enthusiasms and frustrations of the West German middle class. Martin Kippenberger: Everything Is Everywhere is the first scholarly monograph in English on West German artist Martin Kippenberger (1953–1997), one of the most prominent German artists of the 1980s. In this book, Chris Reitz shows that the condition of Kippenberger’s art was an endless, enthusiastic searching, constrained by the impossibility of fulfillment. A child during West Germany’s Wirtschaftswunder, the economic miracle of the 1950s and 1960s, and a young adult during the economic recession and political tumult of the 1970s, Kippenberger belonged to the first truly postwar generation. But, largely uninterested in the legacy of National Socialism that had occupied his predecessors, Kippenberger instead pursued a hyperproductive artistic practice that reflected the dreams and fears of the ascendent 1980s West German middle class. Kippenberger’s ambitions took him everywhere: he founded a museum in Greece, invested in a fashion business and a restaurant, and even bought a gas station in Brazil. He made art in a dizzying range of genres, from paintings to poetry, from posters to stickers. He made art out of his appetites, too, producing art on the theme of his own alcoholism. Intensely entrepreneurial, Kippenberger carried out an artistic practice in which his diverse endeavors, and the people who joined him in them, were all connected in a sprawling network. Reitz deftly presents Kippenberger’s career as an allegory of the neoliberal networks of capital, technology, and culture that spanned Europe and America in the 1980s.

Roberta Smith called him the "madcap bad boy of contemporary German art" and also "one of the three or four best German artists of the postwar period." Martin Kippenberger disrupted the status quo throughout his brief, excessive life, not just by making art of every variety and medium but also by conducting an extended performance in the vicinity of art that involved running galleries, organizing exhibitions, collecting the work of his contemporaries and overseeing assistants. He published books and catalogues, played in a rock-and-roll band and cut records, ran a performance-art space during his early years in Berlin, became part owner of a restaurant in Los Angeles during six months he spent there preparing for an exhibition, and collaborated extensively with other artists. This particular volume considers his output of artist's books, as well as his exhibition catalogues and all the publications whose content he either created or edited. More than just documentation, this publication makes accessible for a wider public the multiple aspects of Kippenberger's books, with all the complexity and consequence of his oeuvre intact.