Feb. 27 (Bloomberg) -- During his short, prolific life, German artist Martin Kippenberger turned everything into art: discarded furniture, hotel paper, platform shoes, chains, cars, magazine clippings.

The results of this incessant production comprise “Martin Kippenberger: The Problem Perspective” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which opens to the public Sunday.     Kippenberger lived life fast -- drinking too much and dying from liver cancer in 1997 at the age of 44. The show -- the artist’s first major U.S. retrospective -- represents just a fraction of his creative output during a 20-year career.     His manic creativity couldn’t be contained within a single medium: There are drawings, collages, paintings, sculpture, installations, photographs and videos. The posters for his exhibitions alone cover a huge wall from floor to ceiling.

Most works have an unpolished look and bellicose attitude.     The title of the show comes from a 1986 text-based painting, “The Problem Perspective. You Are Not the Problem, It’s the Problem Maker in Your Head.”

Titles of other works are equally amusing. There’s a 1983 canvas, “Likable Communist Woman,” which depicts a brunette comrade painted in fiery reds. “Martin, Into the Corner, You Should Be Ashamed of Yourself” (1989) depicts a bald man in suspenders, standing in a corner.

Amerika

    Kippenberger’s last and largest installation, “The Happy End of Franz Kafka’s ‘Amerika’” (1994), with its sprawl of desks and chairs, interprets a scene from the final chapter of the unfinished novel.

Set on a green floor marked like a soccer field and framed by red bleachers, the piece occupies MoMA’s soaring atrium on the second floor. Lawn chairs and bar stools confront sleek modernist furniture and clunky lifeguard stations. Two ominous ejection seats rotate on what looks like a toy railway; a giant sculpture of a fried egg sits in the center of the composition.      Even if you don’t quite know what to make of all the clutter, the humor pulls you in.      The exhibition continues on the sixth floor where a vintage Ford Capri makes an appearance. Collaborating in 1982 with the artist Albert Oehlen, Kippenberger covered the car with brown paint mixed with oat flakes, transforming the relic into a hybrid of minimalism and pop art.

Hotel Stationary

     Kippenberger’s collages and drawings are the most fascinating parts of the show. They reveal a tireless spirit churning out masses of endlessly varied visual material from the most innocuous impressions, thoughts and experiences.      One group of drawings was sketched on hotel stationery from around the world (staying in them was not a prerequisite). Images range from doodles and scribbles to deftly drafted and charming portraits.

Working at the end of the 20th century, after the great modernist era had ended, Kippenberger was struggling to set himself apart from Picasso and Matisse as well as German artists Gerhard Richter and Joseph Beuys. He did so by provoking the establishment.

Swastika Ban

He challenged Germany’s postwar ban on reproducing swastikas in a 1984 geometric canvas, “With the Best Will in the World I Can’t See a Swastika.”

In 1988, he painted himself as an aging, pudgy Picasso, wearing white boxers pulled up high around a rotund waistline as a twisted homage to Picasso’s iconic photograph by David Douglas Duncan.     While the exhibition exposes Kippenberger’s preoccupation with artists who came before him, it also reveals his influence on the current generation.     He set the stage for many of the artists included in last year’s Whitney Biennial and the New Museum’s “Unmonumental” exhibitions.

While these shows featured plenty of found objects and non- art materials made to look like art, they missed the urgency and rebelliousness that makes Kippenberger still cutting-edge and relevant 12 years after his death.

     (Katya Kazakina writes for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are her own.)

To contact the reporter of this story: Katya Kazakina in New York at kkazakina@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: February 27, 2009 00:00 EST