FRIEZE SEOUL

Inside the gallery’s booth, Lipp leads visitors into a bustling garden of sensory stimulation whose mysterious ecosystem is comprised of three-dimensional painting-sculpture hybrid reliefs. In this new suite of works, the artist spotlights the parallel between the core emotional impulses and drives of human beings and those of plant life. ‘The simultaneous complexity and elementary simplicity of the relationships in the biological cosmos contain a magic that I cannot escape. Nature has always been for me a real but also imaginary place of longing, which has something paradisiacal about it’, Lipp has noted in an interview with Dr. Ruth Polleit Riechert. Aiming to capture the core human yearning for connection and interaction, stripped bare of the complications of social anxieties and societal formality, the artist populates his spectral landscapes with glimmering entanglements of cosmic vegetation that embody states of desire, fusion, and intimacy.

Lipps’s multi-stage, labour-intensive creative process begins with drawings of elaborately intricate, fluidly dynamic shapes on paper. He then transfers the sketches to wood and cuts out their silhouettes with a specialty saw, before subjecting the resulting cut-outs to several stages of delicate overpainting, first in black and white traditional brush, and eventually the airbrushed acrylic responsible for the work’s instantly recognisable luminescent glow. The following step sees Lipp preparing a specially designed aluminium stretcher that is covered with a layer of light-absorbing velvet—the feature that serves to further deepen the effect of preternatural fluorescence that strikes the viewer upon first encounter. The artist choreographs and rechoreographs the placements of the cut-outs onto the velvet ground in various arrangements to locate the right dynamic interplay between the expressed motion and sensation of colour and shape. Finally, in the finishing phase, Lipp carefully sands down the edges and surfaces of the assembled relief using the proprietary mixture of sand and paint, creating the seamlessly whole 3D look that strides the border between sculpture and painting.

Bursting with visions of bioluminescent flora and natural elements reminiscent of Hilma af Klint, Henri Rousseau, Max Ernst, and Hieronymus Bosch, while simultaneously evocative of the Sci-Fi landscapes of ‘Annihilation’ and ‘Stalker’ and the hypermodern glow of LED lights and neon signs, these works allude to timeless concepts of connection, eroticism, and passion.

Yet while the brilliant jade hues and floral shapes evocative of orchids and tulips characteristic of Lipp’s distinctive aesthetic connect to the classical art historical subject of the Garden of Eden and the various creation myths, the works created for Frieze Seoul are a singular reflection on a highly personal subject, too. Conceived during the months of the artist’s wife’s pregnancy, the ubiquitous appearance of a precious pearl throughout the series thus not only threads a historical throughline to the pervasive motif of both European and Eastern art through history, but also expresses a deeply private and loving sentiment in the same gesture.

Mevlana Lipp (b. 1989 Cologne, Germany. Lives and works in Düsseldorf, Germany) is deeply fascinated by the natural world in its pure state, as well as in the space it occupies in the human imagination. To Lipp, the curling tendril of a vine, the rounded form of a seed pod or the gentle swaying feathers of a crinoid become signifiers of complex sets of emotions and experiences, communicated in a language outside of human linguistic codes. Part semiotic metaphor part primordial creatures from the deep, the organic organisms in Lipp’s artwork reach out across time and consciousness to whisper about where all things began.

His solo exhibitions include Haptic Memory (2022, Capsule Shanghai, Shanghai, China); Pacific (2021, Plus One Gallery, Antwerp, Belgium); Fluidum (2020, Andersen’s Contemporary: The Other’s Space, Copenhagen, Denmark). He has participated in group exhibitions at PM/AM Gallery, London, UK (2022); The Hole, Los Angeles, USA (2022); Workplace Gallery, London, UK (2021) and Tick Tack Gallery, Antwerp, Belgium (2020), among others.