Laurie Lipton’s “L.A. Sous-Real”

Opening Reception – Saturday, July 14, 2012 at 7:00-9:00pm. Ace Gallery Los Angeles.

“I fear death and oblivion the most, which is why I try to capture, on paper, the fleeting horror and wonder of being alive.”
- Laurie Lipton

Laurie Lipton thinks in images and renders her psychically rich inner world visible via detailed pencil on paper drawings. Throughout her work, Lipton complicates conventional notions of the grotesque by intertwining elements of beauty, domesticity, humor, horror, life and death. Lipton’s curious assemblage of characters, their expressions and her use of chiaroscuro settings re-articulate the knowable world.

Lipton reveals the ways in which typically mundane objects and relationships are rife with peculiarities and absurdities by imagining machines as living and breathing entities with functioning arteries and, conversely, by imagining humans as extensions of machines unable to function as simply human. When Lipton gives a conventional 1950s housewife a clown face or makes skeletons the drivers of automobiles that go nowhere except “Round & Round” she challenges superficial intelligence and conformist associations.

Ace Gallery is host to Laurie Lipton’s “L.A. Sous-Real,” an exhibition of the artist’s most recent drawings. With an understated elegance and savvy innocence, these works exemplify Lipton’s technical prowess and depict her bizarre encounters upon relocating back to the United States from London.

Laurie Lipton was born in New York and began drawing detailed images at the age of four. She was the first person to graduate from Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania with a Fine Arts Degree in Drawing (with honours). She has lived in Holland, Belgium, Germany, France and London. Her work has been exhibited extensively throughout Europe and the USA.

On view through September 8, 2012
Ace Gallery – 5514 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90036 (Between La Brea & LACMA)

One hour complimentary parking during the day with validation available from 10am – 6pm (immediately behind the gallery between Dunsmuir and Burnside)