When Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa was unveiled in the Paris salon of 1819, there were gasps of horror (and low whistles of admiration) at its political audacity. The painting depicted a public scandal of just three years prior, the tale of a slave ship stranded at sea and then abandoned by its incompetent state-appointed captain. The painting’s stark contrast of despair and hope—a monumental composition of contorted bodies capped by a figure who has just spotted a ship on the horizon—eventually cemented Géricault’s reputation within the Romantic movement. The painting’s dramatic emotional heroism made it a natural choice for a project by Martin Kippenberger, as source material for an appropriation that combines parody and respect in equal measures. A restless and prolific artist, Kippenberger extended (and undermined) the legacy of Germany’s Pop forefathers through his excessive gestures and a larger-than-life persona. He returned again and again to painting as a medium, and a year before his premature death in 1997, he produced a multi-part project based on Géricault’s painting. Given that it was one of Kippenberger’s last cycles of work, the concept of death has become the inevitably intertwined with its interpretation. The recent exhibition at Carolina Nitsch features …