Betty Ford Clinic (Betty Ford Klinik)

Betty Ford Clinic depicts a rehabilitation center that opened in Rancho Mirage, California, in 1982, just a few years before Martin Kippenberger produced the painting. The center was well-known for its celebrity patients, but the artist rendered it as a bleak and generic structure, basing the work on a black-and-white photograph from a newspaper clipping. The low-profile building could be any number of facilities: a prison, a museum, or a school. By only identifying the subject in the title, Kippenberger opened up the image to various interpretations based on the complex cultural, political, and social meanings of this kind of institution, among others. This is one of thirty-five works that comprise the Winterbotham Collection. Click here to learn more about the collection.