Kippi (Kippenberger) 1978

Rainer Fetting made this expressive portrait called Kippi (Kippenberger) with bold brushstrokes and a restrained palette. It's like watching the painting come into being right before your eyes – shifting and emerging through trial, error, and intuition. You can almost feel Fetting wrestling with the canvas, deciding which marks to keep, which to bury. It's tempting to imagine what it might have been like to create, what he might have been thinking when he made it. The paint is so thick that you can see the texture on the surface. It brings such emotional resonance to the work. I love that daub of thick red paint near the mouth and chin, like blood, or an open wound. For me, this portrait is part of an ongoing exchange of ideas across time, inspiring each other’s creativity. Ultimately, painting embraces ambiguity and uncertainty, allowing for multiple interpretations. What do you see?