Dossier - Michael Krebber
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Michael Krebber
1954, Keulen - Keulen

Since the mid-eighties, Michael Krebber has built up a reputation in Germany as the assistant and alter ego of the controversial German artist Martin Kippenberger (1953 Dortmund - 1997 Vienna). It is said that if Kippenberger was the bold, satirical critic of politics and the art world, then Krebber was the composed but influential conceptualist behind the scenes. As a young artist, Krebber rejected the neo-expressionist aesthetics of Lüpertz and Baselitz, for instance, in favour of a more ironic approach to source material from both ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture. His deconstruction of the medium led to the almost total disappearance of the notion of the art of painting from his work.
In 2006, the museum acquired an ensemble of paintings by Krebber under the collective title ‘Flaggs (Against Nature)’, from 2003. This work consists of children’s bedding with a print of a horse on it and curtain material (from the roll) in a variety of designs (spots and blocks in various sizes). They are pictures that are not painted, and they do not possess any other artistry except for the fact that they are stretched on a canvas stretcher. They can be exhibited all together or in part.
The practice of appropriating existing works is nothing new. Since Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) and post-war Pop Art, this practice has been a firm fixture in art, leading to all sorts of post-modern forms of appropriation in the eighties. Although ‘Flaggs (Against Nature)’ shows apparently simple existing figurative and abstract images, it conceals quite a complex world of ideas that is not so easily unravelled. The system of codes embedded in Krebber’s artistic practice is carefully linked to a specifically German post-war tradition of painting.
Art experts, therefore, will recognise significant pointers and references in the use of materials, the seriality, the patterns of blocks and spots, and the galloping horse – which also appears in negative and upside down, and is mounted in a slightly different position each time. ‘Flaggs (Against Nature)’ thus appears as an intense ‘debate’ about German Romanticism (Kaspar David Friedrich), the painterly solution of form (Baselitz) and painting and conceptualism (Sigmar Polke), to bourgeois homeliness (Rosemarie Trockel) and art and gender (Cosima von Bonin). Seen in this light, Krebber’s work essentially concerns an exhaustive and endless, but apparently necessary, rhetorical discussion about the importance and impossibility or impossibility of painting as a conceptual discipline.
 
Flaggs (Against Nature), 2003

Images
Collection Bonnefantenmuseum
Flaggs (Against Nature), 2003