Laurie Lipton, among Flemish masters and cyberpunk!
Throughout 2022, the Halle Saint Pierre in Paris proposed a major exhibition devoted to contemporary drawing, in collaboration with the magazine HEY! Modern art & Pop culture: HEY! Le dessin.
Thanks to Anne Richard, founder of the magazine and curator, ArtistesActuels met Laurie Lipton. Among the sixty artists exhibited, Laurie Lipton is headlining with her drawing “Alone in a room, socializing” which is featured on the exhibition poster.
A very personal "Techno-Rococo" style in the tradition of the Flemish primitives and masters
A New Yorker by birth and a graduate of Carnegie-Mellon University (Pennsylvania), Laurie Lipton spent 36 years in Europe. Today, she lives and works in Los Angeles.
Her creative process is patient, meticulous, precise and precious. She uses exclusively black and white charcoal and pencil, respecting an almost sacred trilogy according to Anne Richard’s analysis: composition, subject and technical mastery.
Thus, her army of skeletons reminds us of Bruegel the Elder in “The Triumph of Death” (the Prado Museum in Madrid)
The scale of her compositions, the use of light, the multitude of figures or details and the architecture evoke those of the Flemish primitives and the masters of the Flemish School or the Antwerp School.
Laurie Lipton describes his style as “techno-rococo” in a very serious jest:
It clicks in the ear and describes her creations very well: technical and technological elements that crush and fill the space, curves, interlacing, the fantasy of multitudes of objects. His rococo is techno and not flowery like that of the 18th century: the diversion of the term is facetious.
Contemporary drawing as a witness of its time in the wake of the counter-culture of the 60s and 70s
Laurie Lipton’s steampunk and cyberpunk representation of our time is in the vein of Terry Gillian’s film “Brazil“: an abundance of wires and pipes, a grey landscape with saturated and polluted air, no vegetation, anguished or deceptively smiling faces.
Laurie Lipton deals with all the themes of concern in the 20th and 21st centuries with a certain aggrandizement: overproduction, overconsumption, digital alienation, nuclear risk and new health risks. Her works have an Underground and counter-culture atmosphere from the 60s and 70s, stemming from the anti-nuclear and environmental movements.
Laurie Lipton : a contemporary artist between humility, resilience and hope
Her subjects of inspiration are serious and distressing. She gives us an acidic critical view of our world.
Yet Laurie Lipton is surprisingly friendly and smiling. In her personal life, she has had to show resilience.
Her artistic expression, from childhood, was encouraged by her family and teachers. Laurie Lipton is an example of resilience and humility: she knows that she is very fortunate to be able to create and pass on her testimony to our times.
The catalogue HEY! Le dessin ISBN 978-2-490097-14-2 is available from HEY! modern art & pop culture, in bookshops or at the Halle Saint Pierre
The editorial team
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