Thomas Zipp – Physical Reality and Mental Experience (Scaling a Chimera)

The exhibition title refers to the Chimera – a mythical animal whose appearance is that of a lion, goat, and serpent, an ominous creature embodying the disparate entities within. These apparent antagonisms pervade Zipp’s work. »Physical Reality And Mental Experience (Scaling A Chimera)« lays these bare in the context of a historical continuum, suggesting that man too is a conflicted being, tasked with creating identity out of trauma.

The monumental work »Achtung!: Solarized Deterritorialization Insanity Against Protestantism (England Attacked By The Americas)« (2005-2011), is the centre piece of this exhibition. It is based on Picasso’s epochal »Guernica« (1937), depicting the horrific aftermath of the destruction of the Basque town by the German Legion Condor and Italian troops. Zipp overpaints the original figures, turning them into abstraction and creating space for the anonymous terror of the present. Inserted fragments of speech give a prescient and contemporary voice to our progressive speechlessness, that seems to say: delusion reigns in ourselves.

In the work »Christ’s Entry Into Brussels« (2004), Zipp refers to »Christ’s Entry Into Brussels 1889« by James Ensor, which shows Ensor himself in the guise of Jesus Christ in the midst of an enraged crowd – symbolizing the dawn of modernity accompanied by political and inner turmoil. In »Woodhorse« (2005), an appropriation of the eponymous work by Jackson Pollock, Thomas Zipp alludes to temporality with collage elements.

After his first solo exhibition »Achtung!: Solarized Deterritorialization Insanity Against Protestantism (England Attacked By The Americas)« in 2011, this is the artist’s second exhibition in our gallery. Thomas Zipp, Professor at the Berlin University of the Arts since 2008, lives and works in Berlin.