Jonas Lipps
21.06. – 28.07.2013

In our complex world, speed and an omnipresent overflow of information determine people’s rhythm. Every day we struggle with the enormous challenge of processing all of these influences and maintaining our inner balance.
The artist Jonas Lipps (*1979) may have found a way for himself to process what he has seen and what has happened with and through his art, to create an island of calm for himself.
He reacts to the superlatives, the higher, faster, further, more colorful, brighter, more mobile with predominantly small-format pictures or medium-format objects. Instead of new media, Web X.0, flashy materials or colors, he prefers traditional watercolor painting, and instead of flawless painting surfaces he often uses everyday materials such as junk mail or flyers, newspapers or book pages. And instead of statements, his pictures are filled with ambiguous motifs, no specific genre, i.e. no landscapes, still lifes or portraits, but sometimes everything at once.
With his collage-like image structure, it doesn’t seem to bother him that the paper is not always suitable for the use of watercolor paint. Rather, it seems as if he consciously accepts this technical problem and uses it consciously.
And so the colors, which never completely cover anything and never fully show anything, are perfect for leaving the motifs in the dark and drawing the viewer under the spell of his mysterious images. People, things and numbers are certainly recognizable in the areas of color that seem like wisps of mist, but they elude interpretation or reference. That is why Jonas Lipps does not offer us any universally valid interpretations of our world. His works are fragmentary, intangible, enigmatic and yet they leave the viewer with a subliminal feeling of understanding.
The Kunstverein is presenting Jonas Lipps in his first institutional solo exhibition.

Curated by Jürgen Wesseler.