NEW YORK, NY.- Christie's highly anticipated Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale will offer collectors a masterwork of the 20th Century by Martin Kippenberger, one of the most complex and controversial artist of the 1980s, now considered to be amongst the most important and influential of his generation. Untitled, from his acclaimed self-portrait series, is widely recognized as the most important painting in the artist’s oeuvre. With an estimate of $15-20 million, Untitled is poised to break Kippenberger’s world auction record of $18 million, which was achieved in May 2014 at Christie’s in New York. The painting will be presented in London before being sold at auction on November 12th.

Belonging to Martin Kippenberger’s seminal cycle of Picasso portrait executed in 1988, Untitled compellingly approaches the extraordinary and multivalent vicissitudes central to the artist’s defining practice of self-portraiture. Untitled and the x other works from this series emerge as a direct result of Kippenberger's contemplation of the well-known 1962 photograph of Pablo Picasso taken by photojournalist, David Douglas Duncan. Exuding an overwhelming abundance of confident masculinity, Duncan's photograph of the eighty-one year old artist exhibits an esteemed amount of buoyant virility. Parodying his famous antecedent, Kippenberger playfully subverts the machismo associated with the genre of self-portraiture in his fleshy, underwear clad depiction. Conceived while travelling with his friend and fellow artist, Albert Oehlen, in Spain, Kippenberger pictures himself with a visually arresting lack of vanity. This is not a celebration of the beauty of the self, for Kippenberger, the self-portrait was no exercise in hubris, but an intense psychological examination of the decadence of self-destruction by means of excess and the subsequent demise of the corporeal self.

“Fighting against convention, Kippenberger lived life to the full. With his punk sensibilities, he was the “anti-art” artist and wasn’t afraid to let people know it. Pushing the boundaries of everything he did—from his art to the way he lived his life—was the ultimate expression of himself as an artist. In this extraordinary work, a masterpiece of contemporary painting, Kippenberger arrogantly portrays himself as the greatest of all 20th century painters, Pablo Picasso. Based on the famous photograph of the Spanish painter, he mimics his hero’s egotistical stance, complete with his oversized underpants. With a delicious sense of irony, Kippenberger portrays himself as a modern day master and the legitimate heir to Picasso’s legacy as one of the greatest modern painters of his age,” declared Brett Gorvy, Chairman and International Head of Post-War and Contemporary Art.

in the spring of 1988, while in travelling in Vienna, and staying in the Pension Elite, Kippenberger took a series of photographs of himself posing around this hotel room in his underpants and had these made up into a luxuriously produced pin-up calendar which he called ‘Elite 88’. This calendar in turn served as the prompt for one of his greatest and best-known series of works - the eight, large-scale, mock-epic, self-portrait paintings he was to make a few months later, in the summer, in Spain. Portraits of the master and his creations, these paintings were in one respect an imitation of the grandiose and often pompous tradition of portraiture of the past and a lampooning of it. Untitled of 1988 is one of the finest of this now famous series of self-portrait paintings drawing on this ignominious moment of self-reflection in a Vienna hotel room. It presents a towering and ungainly Kippenberger standing, bearded, in his underpants and appearing to rise like an apparition from the center of a quasi-cubist architectural structure which looks like a piece of furniture or a reminiscence of ‘Baconian’ cages.

In referencing Picasso in the self-portraits that he made in Spain, Kippenberger was knowingly elevating his own self- status, legend and public profile to the same level, simultaneously both de-bunking the Picasso-myth and claiming his own place in it as an ‘heir-apparent’. This is an aspect of these works which in the late 1980s seemed both impertinent and preposterous, but one which over time, and as perhaps Kippenberger indeed knew, has come to be seen as a more justifiable or even rightful pairing and inheritance. When Charles Saatchi, for instance, was asked by the Financial Times journalist, Jackie Wullschlager, in 2005, why he had included Kippenberger’s work in his exhibition on The Triumph of Painting’, he immediately answered by making a Kippenberger-Picasso comparison: “Kippenberger! He’s the Picasso of our times! …I’m certain of it. In twenty years people will see it. Like Picasso, he was never committed to any one style. Perhaps I should have just done a Kippenberger show.”