Kippenberger also felt that he was working in the face of a 'perceived death of painting' and his art reflects his struggle with the concept that, at the turn of the millennium, it was impossible to produce anything original or authentic. "Blass vor Neid steht er vor deiner Tür with Envy, He Stands Outside Your Door" (1981), for instance, comprises twenty-one individual canvases shown together as one work, but each canvas has a separate title and there is no consistent style. In 1987 he integrated a 1972, all-gray abstract painting by Gerhard Richter, which he himself had purchased, into the top of a coffee table. For the photorealist paintings from a series titled "Lieber Maler, Male Mir" or "Dear Painter, Paint Me", Kippenberger hired a commercial painter named Werner to make them and signed them Werner Kippenberger. "Untitled installation of the White Paintings" make formal reference to debates around language-based conceptual art as a critique of the ‘empty’ white cube gallery space. In a first series of works alluding to Picasso that were to follow in 1988, Kippenberger took this project further, looking to the ultimate Modern icon as a contemporary foil. Restaging a well-known photograph by David Douglas Duncan of Picasso standing in a 'puffed-up' state of undress on the steps of Château Vauvenargues in 1962 Kippenberger was parodying his famous antecedent, playfully subverting the machismo associated with the genre of self-portraiture. First adopted as a motif in his 1988 series of self-portraits undertaken in Carmona, Spain, Kippenberger depicted himself with white briefs pulled up high over his exaggerated belly, as he turned to examine himself in a mirror.