What Remains When You Shave Off the Supergeil

Friedrich Liechtenstein built a persona so architecturally complete it’s hard to know where the performance ends and the person begins. The mustache, the bathrobe, the deadpan delivery of the word supergeil drifting through a supermarket aisle—that 2014 EDEKA ad turned him into Germany’s most beloved eccentric almost overnight, which was funny because he’d been doing exactly this since the nineties.

Then spring came and he shaved it all off. The beard, the mustache, everything. What emerged was a face almost jarring in its ordinariness—which was, of course, entirely the point. His album Bad Gastein had already suggested there was a real musician beneath the art object, but the face under the facial hair confirmed it: an ordinary man inside an extraordinary construction, and neither half cancels the other out.

I keep thinking about artists whose persona is structural—where you can’t remove the costume without the whole thing collapsing. Liechtenstein doesn’t seem to worry about that. He shaves, he grows it back, the supergeil is non-negotiable. The persona holds because it was never a disguise.