Group shows normally have one or two anchors, these are the pieces that hold a show together, often large, or well known in some way, these anchors, or weights, allow the other works in an exhibition the freedom to just be. Like in party, these other works can float about, dance around, make comments, flirt a little, look moody and generally have a good time. The anchors are holding the show together.
In Monument to the Unimportant, the winter group show at Pace, London, one of these anchors holds its ground by more than just its physical presence. “Design for a Mothers’ Rest Home in Heilbronn” 1985, by the legendary German artist Martin Kippenberger (1953 – 1997), is a sculpture, architectural proposal and personal biographic give away, or a self-aimed dark joke. As a sculpture it is simple enough, two wooden pallets are placed on top of each other, stamped with the letters DB, for Deutsche Bahn, the German railway company, out of this rough square a quarter is cut and removed. This simple action gives the pallets the look of a European Modernist housing block, the type popular in the post-war Germany Kippenberger grew up in with his family. The wooden pallets also have a personal meaning for the artist and his family, as Kippenberger’s mother was killed by one falling from a truck in a car accident in 1976. The tragedy, and the inheritance it led to, meant that Kippenberger was free financially to pursue an art career without having to worry about money. To foreground the difficult and the private, whilst embracing the good fortune from a disaster is a very Kippenberger thing to do. Holding the very negative and the positive at once. Art from suffering, individual freedom from tragedy, these were very present ideas in a Germany that was booming economically after the horror of the second world war. Guilt dealt with in a very direct way was the artists go to stance, like a stand-up comedian and shaman in one, confronting the audiences’ discomfort through an exorcism of what is commonly known but rarely spoken of. The housing estate, the proposed rest home for a mother, is a dream of an ideal future, built from traumatic materials. This is a great work from Kippenberger, but great works can disbalance a group show, making the rest look light or shallow, luckily for Monument to the Unimportant there are others.
Keith Coventry’s sculpture “Quaker Road, E1” from 2010, is a contemporary classic and a later version of a work the artist has created before, the Tate Gallery for example own a version from 1994, it’s a bronze cast of a tree and its supporting post. The tree has been snapped off at almost exactly the point at which the upright post stops protecting it. Coventry titles these works with a plaque attached to the base of the vandalized tree, this one reads, “QUAKER ROAD E1. PLANTED 2008. DESTROYED 2010”. Coventry, like Kippenberger, is a master of holding the hopeful and the despairing in a single work. In his tree sculptures he uses his incredible talent for spotting the pathos in the everyday of British urban life to full effect. Housing estates, discarded drug paraphernalia, fast food packaging and, in this case, the wrecked remains of civic good intentions reoccur throughout the artists’ practice. I’m not alone in believing Coventry is one of the UK’s most interesting artists, and one who has been hugely undervalued by the establishment. Maybe crack pipes and vandalism don’t play well to museums and the international biennales that are the art world’s equivalent of the Oscars? They should though, as Coventry’s work says “this is us” more poetically than many of his more famous peers.
Konrad Klapheck’s “Die schöne Hausfrau” (the beautiful housewife) is a smallish, dark framed oil painting from 1967. The painting is a fairly flat, graphic, picture of a shower head in a bathroom and would be completely boring if it wasn’t for what Klapheck does with it. Klapheck was born in Dusseldorf in 1935 to art historian parents and Konrad went on to study at the Kunstakademie there and would in later life teach there, he died in 2023 at the age of 88. Nothing in this artists biography; born, studied, taught and died in the same city, or the list of subjects he painted, which included typewriters, taps and showers, telephones, saws, bicycle bells and clocks, sets you up for just how strange his paintings are. There is something of the fetishistic in his portrayal of his subjects – and one definition of “fetish” is “having an excessive and irrational devotion or commitment to a particular thing”. A fetish is often a mystery or alien, to those outside the circle of the devoted and committed, yet Klapheck’s paintings draw you in, fascinate, is because of the sex? I feel his work is in essence very human, the artist himself stated in an interview “the machines became living people” and that “the whole thing is inspired by the governing idea of life and power” (interview by Harvard Art Museums). People, life and power, which itself could be the name of a fetish night in Dusseldorf.
Monument to the Unimportant brings together many other artists under an umbrella of “art’s enduring ability to transform the overlooked into sites of inquiry and vision of delight”, these include Henni Alftan, Genesis Belanger, Elmgreen and Dragset, Nathalie Du Pasquier, Urs Fischer, Sylvie Fluery, Robert Gober, David Hockney, Jac Leirner, Tony Matelli, Claes Oldenburg, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Wayne Thiebaud, Rachel Whiteread, Erwin Wurm and B. Wurtz. The show works well as a whole, and has been thoughtfully put together by Pace, not a given for a group show in a blue chip commercial gallery in 2025. I came away thinking about Kippenberger’s mother, Klapheck’s bathroom and Coventry’s council estates which seem the very opposite to the Unimportant. They are the stories, people and settings of our lives, and very deserving of monuments.
Monument to the Unimportant until the 14th Feb, 2026 Pace, London
All images: Installation view, Monument to the Unimportant, 26th November 2025-14th February 2026, Pace Gallery, London Photography by Damian Griffiths, courtesy Pace Gallery
