English
Deutsch
until 02.06. | #1942ARTatBerlin | Galerie Guido W. Baudach shows from 28th April 2018 the exhibition “Moon Gas” by the artist Thomas Zipp.
Galerie Guido W. Baudach is looking forward to present MOON GAS, a show revolving around the subject of the eponymic anaesthetic and other disaster protection measures, for which Thomas Zipp is going to create a full body of new works, bringing together various media in a comprehensive installation.
Under the title Moon Gas, Zipp presents a large-scale staging in which different media components complement each other in a multi-sensory way. In addition to several paintings of various materials and an equally extensive and varied series of works on paper, visitors can expect a commercial vehicle mutated into a mobile sculpture – all embedded in an interactive sound installation.
The contextual core of the exhibition is a seventy-part series of drawings, in which Thomas Zipp enthusiastically reviews the exploration of the challenge of creativity through destructive moments in nature and technology that is so characteristic of his work. The basis of the series is a guide issued by the Federal Office for Civil Protection and Disaster Assistance for emergency preparedness and correct action in emergency situations. Distinguished by a hugely varied graphic and painterly treatment of the booklet, reproduced in single sheets on different types of paper, Zipp presents a key work of his own artistic practice.
The dominant sculptural element of the exhibition is a real and at the same time metaphorically understood means of transport, a tractor carrying in its trailer medical nitrous oxide bottles and elements of military rockets. With its white and black lacquered components, this Ready Made Remade is not only reminiscent of the consistent, basic abstraction of the Russian avant-garde, but is also inspired by the Dazzle camouflage paint of the British Navy during the First World War, which was also incorporated into the 1960s Emerging Op Art and from there into pop culture.
Also part of Moon Gas’s emerging cultural and engineering history is a rebuilt Moog, a modular synthesizer system that enriched pop music in the 1960s. Visitors to the exhibition are invited to create sounds on this synthesizer, which is controlled by a theremin, an ether wave instrument invented around 1920. The resulting sounds combine with the soundscape of a permanent sound installation. To this end, Thomas Zipp has installed several pressure-chamber loudspeakers in the room, as they are used in football stadiums or at public rallies and involuntarily think of mass suggestion. You can hear a loop from a track released in 1963 by Dick Hyman called Moon Gas, which can be described as Space Age Pop – a reminiscent of Sun Ra, but white cocktail Jazz Electric space fantasy, the sonically anticipated both the seizure of the Earth-satellite and the psychedelic escapism of the Woodstock generation. Not for nothing the invitation card for the exhibition shows a photo of one of the then popular nitrous oxide parties.
The works on canvas, in turn, illustrate in a new form elements and motifs that are absolutely typical of the visual vocabulary of the artist. Painting quotations from twentieth-century art, for example, encounter topics in the history of science, while geometrical structures and patterns are overlaid by figurative, partially vegetal elements. Significantly, Zipp’s new paintings work more than ever as Combine Paintings, i. as paintings in which the image surface is enriched with sculptural components and thus overcome the usual two-dimensionality.
The picture (yet untitled 1, 2018) is characterized by such multi-dimensionality and ambiguity at the same time. The motive of a potted plant is applied as overpainted silkscreen on a geometrically rigorous, rhythmically black-and-white triangular surface. Their flesh-colored stems and leaves have the appearance of a human being, which has to assert itself in an inorganic environment. The picture (yet untitled 2, 2018), in which the head and arms of a female figure are combined with a powerful brushstroke, shows a human figure. The paint marks on the broom held by the image figure identify the woman as a ‘new Eve’ who, unlike her biblical predecessor, has created herself.
With Moon Gas, Thomas Zipp consistently continues his examination of the correspondence between technological development and the former vitality of the art movements of the twentieth century, initially perceived as progressive. In the meantime, as the artistic as well as industrial emergence of modernity predicted as a positive moment of world improvement has vanished, since the end of the epoch not only the remnants and phantasms of the unredeemed, but also the signs of permanent danger have emerged , In the artistic practice of Thomas Zipp, this dark, hauntological dimension reveals itself in a partly unleashed, partly restrained dynamic that creates its own, stable and fragile field of force.
Thomas Groetz
Thomas Zipp was born in 1966 in Heppenheim. He has participated in numerous international exhibitions at home and abroad, including: “Germany Is not an Island”, Collection of Contemporary Art of the Federal Republic of Germany Purchases from 2012 to 2016, Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn (2018) / The Threshold Problem and Some Possible Ways to Solve It, Cc Foundation & Art Space, Shanghai (2016) / Manifesta 11, Zurich (2016) / Picasso in Contemporary Art, Deichtorhallen Hamburg (2015) / Avatar & Atavism, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (2015) / 11ème Biennale de l’Art Africain Contemporain, DAK’ART 2014, Dakar (2014) / 55th International Art Exhibition, Comparative Investigation on the Disposition of the Width of a Circle, La Biennale di Venezia, (2013) / I knOw yoU, Irish Museum of Modern Art (2013 ) / Paintings from the Rubell Family Collection, Fundación Banco Santander (2012) / If Not In This Period Of Time: Contemporary German Painting 1989- 2010, Museu de Arte São Paulo (2010) / Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Roc k and Roll Since 1967, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2008) / Familiar Terrain – Current Art in & about Germany, ZKM, Karlsruhe (2008) / 4th Berlin Biennial (2006) / Defamation of Character, PS1, New York (2006 ) / Rings of Saturn, Tate Modern, London (2006) / Actionbutton, Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum for Contemporary Art – Berlin (2003). The next institutional solo exhibition by Thomas Zipp will take place in the Kunsthalle Giessen in autumn 2018.
Vernissage: Friday, 27th April 2018, 06:00 – 09:00 p.m.
Exhibition period: Saturday, 28th April to Saturday, 02nd June 2018
[maxbutton id=”96″]
Bildunterschrift: Courtesy by Galerie Guido W. Baudach – Thomas Zipp
ExhibitionThomas Zipp- Galerie Guido W. Baudach | Contemporary Art – Kunst in Berlin – ART at Berlin
