Meg Lipke questions conventional notions of painting with her colorful, shaped abstractions. Working directly on canvas or cloth, the artist may cut, stain, or sew her materials to create compositions that project from the wall, or rest upon the floor. The space around and between each form is as much the artist’s subject as her final creation. Many of these soft, pliable paintings imaginatively conjure up aspects of the body – disembodied limbs or arms – seemingly animate and poised to leave the space.
Through approach and process, Lipke summons past craft traditions, memories of her mother and grandmother’s creative practice, and canons of 20th-century modernism. The artist deftly draws upon these legacies making innovative and remarkable work that reinvigorates the possibilities of contemporary abstraction. In the Making features work made by Lipke over the past five years, tracing the artist’s inspired evolution from suspended canvas, to low-relief, soft paintings and totemic sculptures, to her most recent large-scale work including the monumental, 16-foot Slanting Grid, created for this solo exhibition.
Meg Lipke (b. 1969, Portland, OR) was raised in Burlington, Vermont, and spent summers with her mother’s family in Cheshire, England. She received her BA from the University of Vermont, MFA from Cornell University, and has taught at SUNY Albany, Cornell University, and Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. She has been featured in solo shows at Broadway Gallery, NYC; Jeff Bailey Gallery, Hudson, NY; and Freight and Volume, NYC. Currently, Lipke resides in Chatham, NY.
Burlington City Arts is supported in part by the New England Foundation for the Arts through the New England Arts Resilience Fund, part of the United States Regional Arts Resilience Fund, an initiative of the U.S. Regional Arts Organizations and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, with major funding from the federal CARES Act from the National Endowment for the Arts, and by the Vermont Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts.
