Jonas Lipps

Spring 2014 finds Grieder Contemporary premiering in Switzerland a solo exhibition featuring Berlin based artist Jonas Lipps. 

Jonas Lipps is taken by the idea of the loss of control and playing with different realities. Recent years have found him repeatedly and liberally contrasting grand artistic gestures with a mishmash of small-format, seemingly randomly selected watercolours, collages, photographs and sculptural installations.

These arbitrary-looking arrangements also feature in this exhibition, for which Lipps lets new and old watercolours, collages and linocuts engage in dialogue. Pictorial creations emerge on all kinds of found paper – flyers, perforated notebook pages, typed and yellowing sheets – alternating between still lives and landscapes, comics and caricatures, portraits and genre scenes. The motifs chosen by Lipps relate to remembered and, in part, photographed situations, as well as to images from the press, art history and advertising, although none is entirely clear-cut or identifiable. Jonas Lipps‘s surreal visuals with their occasional expressionist hints can be read as dream creations or allegories, as places in which the unconscious carves out a path – for the artist as well as for the observer. The materials, techniques, choices of motif and styles of his works reflect the thievish pleasure Lipps takes in liberally manipulating the expectations of the observer. Lipps's oeuvre displays a marvellous sense of irony blended with earnestness. Asked about his approach to his work, Lipps answers: "Dilettantism is a great help."

Jonas Lipps (*1979) lives and works in Berlin. His work has been exhibited at venues that include the Prague Biennale, the Biennale of Young Artists (Bucharest) and the Chelsea Art Museum, New York.