Betty Ford Clinic (Betty Ford Klinik)

Courtesy of the artist and Petzel, New York, photo by Jason Mandella.

1985

Martin Kippenberger
German, 1953-1997

Betty Ford Clinic depicts a rehabilitation center that opened in Rancho Mirage, California, in 1982, just a few years before Martin Kippenberger produced the painting. The center was well-known for its celebrity patients, but the artist rendered it as a bleak and generic structure, basing the work on a black-and-white photograph from a newspaper clipping. The low-profile building could be any number of facilities: a prison, a museum, or a school. By only identifying the subject in the title, Kippenberger opened up the image to various interpretations based on the complex cultural, political, and social meanings of this kind of institution, among others.

This is one of thirty-five works that comprise the Winterbotham Collection. Click here to learn more about the collection.

Status: On View, Gallery 295
Department: Contemporary Art

Artist: Martin Kippenberger
Title: Betty Ford Clinic (Betty Ford Klinik)
Place: Germany (Artist's nationality:)
Date Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.: 1985
Medium: Oil and lacquer on canvas
Dimensions: 179.8 × 299.8 cm (70 3/4 × 118 in.)
Credit Line: Joseph Winterbotham Collection
Reference Number: 2024.86
Copyright: © Estate of Martin Kippenberger, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne

Ronald Jones, “Martin Kippenberger: Domination of the Universal” Arts Magazine, (Sept. 1985): 114 (color ill.), 115.
Diedrich Diedrrichsen, “Building with Slits. Three Paintings by Martin Kippenberger” Artscribe, (June–July 1986): 35 (color ill.).
Wolfgang Beeh, Johann-Karl Schmidt, and Detlev Gretenkort, Miete, Strom, Gas, exh. cat. (Darmstadt: Das Landesmuseum, 1986), 104 (ill.), 166, cat. 36.
Stephan Ellis, “The Boys in the Bande.” Art in America 76, no. 12 (December 1988): 115 (color ill.).
Angela Choon, “Irony at Work: Martin Kippenberger (at Metro Pictures),” Art & Antiques (January 1994): 27 (ill.).
Gregory Williams, “The Happy End of Kippenberger’s Amerika” Artforum International 41, no. 6 (February 2003): 99 (color ill.).
Gisela Capitain and Lisa Franzen, ed., Martin Kippenberger: Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, Volume II 1938-86 (Cologne: Walther & Franz Koenig, 2023), 246, 258, 259 (color ill.).

New York, Metro Pictures, Martin Kippenberger, May 25–June 15, 1985, no cat.
Philadelphia, Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, Investigations 28: Martin Kippenberger, June 9–July 30, 1989, no cat.
New York, Metro Pictures, Pictures of an Exhibition - Part 2, Jan. 22–Feb. 19, 1994, no cat.

The artist; sold through Max Hetzler, Cologne, to Metro Pictures, New York, mid 1980s [this and the following, email from Petzel, New York, copy in curatorial object file]; sold to Alf Naman, New York, March 29, 2021; sold through Petzel, New York, to the Art Institute of Chicago, June 11, 2024.

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Date Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.

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