Ben Brown Fine Arts Hong Kong is pleased to present recent works on paper by Berlin based artist Jonas Lipps, in the Gallery’s Project Room, in the Pedder Building. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition in Hong Kong and the first time his work will be shown in Asia.
This exhibition brings together a group of watercolours in various formats, though rarely extending beyond A4. They show remembered and sometimes previously photographed situations, constructed images, but also elements from public image-banks such as newspaper photos or advertisements. All the genres seem to be included: landscape, portrait, still life, and at the same time none of these, since the thing represented is, though recognizable, never physical, or tangible, or object-like. When using photographic sources, particular parts are emphasized by the tracing of contours, subsequently covered with transparent layers of paint. In this kind of painting it’s not a question of a demonstration of virtuosity, more important is how, in the painting process, there are repeatedly changes of orientation, and detours, which result from self-imposed constraints and resistances. Lipps often works with papers which are badly suited to watercolour, and which through the subsequent loss of control over the paint flow, prevent a predetermined representation. This paper can be of different origins and qualities: leaflets, book pages, or the squared pages of exercise books, partly stained and ripped. On some sheets, by leaving the edge white, a Polaroid-like format comes about, like a passe-partout.
A large part of the information seems to lie outside the image; the before and after is implied. None of the motives depict an extraordinary event, often they are casual gestures, and constellations of anthropomorphic figures, persons or things. The viewer thus lands in a situation which however avoids the anecdotal.
Jonas Lipps was born in 1979 in Freiburg/ Breisgau. He was educated at the Universitaet der Kuenste (UdK), Berlin, and is currently living and working in Berlin.
