After graduating, Kippenberger spent time in Florence, Paris, Cologne, and Berlin, playing in bands, painting, and
managing small artist - run galleries.
While a
small show, it
managed to include an ensemble of work ranging from jade disks dating to the late Neolithic period, found photos from mid-century America, bronze sculptures from the 1980s, and works on paper by several contemporary
artists.
Early in 1940 we
managed to find a
small house and for the next three years... I was not able to carve at all... the only sculptures I carried out were some
small plaster maquettes for the second «sculpture with colour», and it was not until 1943, when we moved to another house, that I was able to carve this idea... In St Ives I was fortunate enough to have constant contact with
artists and writers and craftsmen who lived there, Ben Nicholson my husband, Naum Gabo, Bernard Leach, Adrian Stokes, and there was a steady stream of visitors from London who came for a few days rest, and who contributed in a great measure to the important exchange of ideas and stimulus to creative activity... It was during this time that I gradually discovered the remarkable pagan landscape which lies between St Ives, Penzance and Land's End; a landscape which still has a very deep effect on me, developing all my ideas about the relationship of the human figure in landscape - sculpture in landscape and the essential quality of light in relation to sculpture which induced a new way of piercing the forms to contain colour... The sea, a flat diminishing plane, held within itself the capacity to radiate an infinitude of blues, greys, greens and even pinks of strange hues; the lighthouse and its strange rocky island was an eye; the Island of St Ives an arm, a hand, a face... I used colour and strings in many of the carvings of this time.