Martin Kippenberger — Ohne Titel (Lieber Maler, male mir), 1981, Artist Postcard, Edition5, 2006

Published by Edition5, 2006 (Order 2040 MK).

Publisher’s postcard reproducing Martin Kippenberger’s Ohne Titel (Lieber Maler, male mir) (1981), issued by Edition5 in 2006. The reverse carries the Estate copyright, Galerie Gisela Capitain credit, and Edition5 order reference.

The painting belongs to Kippenberger’s celebrated Lieber Maler, male mir… (“Dear Painter, Paint for Me…”) series, in which he commissioned a commercial sign painter to execute images from his instructions, challenging conventional ideas of artistic authorship, originality, and authenticity years before such questions became central to contemporary art discourse. The reproduced image — showing a suited man reclining on a discarded sofa at a city intersection, an Exxon sign visible in the background — combines urban banality with staged performance, humour, and alienation, characteristics that define much of Kippenberger’s practice.

Produced during the period surrounding the major international reassessment of Kippenberger’s work, the postcard belongs to a moment when printed reproductions became an important means of extending the artist’s legacy beyond the gallery. Rather than documenting a single exhibition, it functions as a portable reproduction of one of his most significant early paintings, itself a work questioning authorship through delegated painting.

Today these Edition5 postcards have become modest but increasingly desirable artefacts of Kippenberger’s expanding posthumous reception. They occupy a space between publisher’s ephemera, artist reproduction, and collectible printed matter, preserving the circulation of an image that remains central to late twentieth-century conceptual and post-conceptual art.

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