Martin Kippenberger

German painter, sculptor, photographer, and performance artist born in Dortmund in 1953 who became one of the most influential figures of his generation. Emerging in the early 1980s alongside Albert Oehlen and Günther Förg, he trained at the Hochschule für Bildende Kunst and directed a Berlin artists' venue before building a reputation for work that attacked the pretensions of the art world with savage humor and relentless productivity. His 1988 self-portrait series depicted himself with deliberate lack of flattery. He died in Vienna in March 1997 from liver cancer, aged 44, leaving a body of work insistently critical of consumerism and institutional mythology.