Jeff Koons

With his 1987 sculpture Kiepenkerl Jeff Koons replaced the bronze statue of the “Kiepenkerl” on Spiekerhof with a perfect copy made of polished stainless steel. The “Kiepenkerl” character, a peddler with cap and pipe who traditionally travelled around the Münsterland region bearing his woven basket of wares (“Kiepe”) on his back, had already been immortalised in a statue erected in the old town on 1896. After its destruction in World War II the original monument carved in Baumberg sandstone was replaced by a bronze copy. Today the statue is still immensely popular and is known beyond the city as an emblem of Münster.

Jeff Koons' re-enactment of the “Kiepenkerl” worked with the familiar original forms but defamiliarised the material. As the “material of the masses”¹ the stainless steel in which the new sculpture was cast was consistent with Koons’s overall artistic concept. In allusion to the to the Prinzipialmarkt as an up-market shopping district, its brightly polished surface also appeared to suggest a sham façade of luxury. The artist thereby raised the “Kiepenkerl” to a new level of perception, divesting the figure of its original folkloric character.

Ronja Primke

¹ Jeff Koons, “Kiepenkerl”, in: Klaus Bußmann and Kasper König (eds.), Skulptur Projekte in Münster 1987, exhib. cat. Westfälisches Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, Münster, Cologne, 1987, 164–166 (here: 164).