Broadway is pleased to present Meg Lipke: Ingredients You Can See and Pronounce, the second solo exhibition at the gallery by the artist.
Known for her sculptural sewn canvases, Lipke has taken the spatial lessons of the three-dimensional work (as well as those from her collaborations with dancers) to forge a parallel path with a new series of more straightforward but subtly shaped canvases. Her new choice of support—curved at one corner like an isolated contour of an iPhone—provides a more direct platform for Lipke’s restless experimentation.
Rhythmic patterning in black, and accumulated pictograms laid on unprimed canvas give way to areas of pure color that take us from Lascaux to high Modernism. In fact, new research has shown that some of the earliest marks on cave walls (in particular the handprints) were made by women—a bit of primal DNA that Lipke carries forward here. Furthermore, many of the paintings take their titles from Paleolithic sites in the U.K. that the artist visited in her youth and which made an indelible impression. Deep history and grand compositions have been endemic to her practice as a result.
As such, these paintings perform a kind of lexicon of mark-making where loose-limbed geometry collides with more biomorphic masses. This graphic eclecticism enables a complex internal logic that unfolds upon sustained viewing.
Perhaps it is due to this holistic approach the works are both free and fraught in equal measure—as if hopefulness and resignation are acknowledged as both constant and coexistent—and in this way Lipke provides us with succinct indices of our time.
