GALERIE LELONG / JOHN GIBSON Donald Lipski has steadfastly bleaching-mattered the waves of Conceptualism that have refuel carved work during the last two decades.

GALERIE LELONG / JOHN GIBSON

Donald Lipski has steadfastly bleaching-mattered the waves of Conceptualism that have refuel carved work during the last two decades. Apart from grouping his idiosyncratic renderings according to the in the greatest degree general object- or process-related axes, the latter-day surrealist has set asideed metaphorical reference in his work as a rule--content rather to recast the quotidian, finding the sublime in the transformation and permutation itself, not in an altered object's meaning. still over the last ten years Lipski's work has gradually begun to explore themes, synthesizing in the proces the poetic and unfamiliar associations of his earlier assemblages.

Lipski's early statuary involved a process of accumulation. At first he used household items like matchsticks, rubber bands, paper clips, or strips of rope, and then began to include larger drifts twisted, woven, or embedded in one other material (a sampling of his '80 work was concurrently forward view at John Gibson). This conversion of the commonplace elevated the rectified readymade to an almost pictorial realm, as it emphasized the abstracted nature of his recycl ends especially when hung on the wall. With his early-'90s flag series the artist began to influence into a more symbolic style as he eschewed the plant object and began to bring to maturity large, fabricated installation pieces with metaphorical references

This direction was evident in Lipski's indicate at Galerie Lelong, "Exquisite Copse" by dint of eliding the "r," he inflects the arbitrariness of the Surrealists' "exquisite corpse" with intentionality and specificity of allusion Having recently crowned the novel Grand Central Station Market with an immense inverted-tree chandelier (Sirshasana, 1999) Lipski continues to explore recent ways to reinvest the arboreal with surrealist whimsy and more than a touch of artifice. Here he has teamed up with Jonquil LeMaster (referr to in the pres release as the "world's foremost artificial tree builder") to create variously shaped and truncated cast-resin log and limbs in unerring trompe l'oeil detail.

"Exquisite Copse" is at its best when it plays in succession the notion of the natural. In loophole after twisted knot, nature's caprice is tamed in this arbor of bark-covered symmetries and geometric shapes. so culturally determined forms are readyed alongside other works whose assemblages are reminiscent of the artist's earlier, more explicitly surrealist and playful nature. however while a tree stump housing an ancient doorknob and lock, limbs enveloping shears or a pickax, or a two-legg stub standing in high tie-up avails help transform the gallery into a dreamscape, they also speed the risk of being experienced barely as visual gags. In Exquisite grove No. 13 (all works 2000) for example, baseballs are embedded in a large log onward the floor (perhaps a temporal conflation of the narrative of a unpliant bat), a concept whose execution falls flat. However, in Exquisite coppice No. 14, where a horizontal limb houses a lengthy glass rod resembling a thermometer, the ideas of dialectical connected view (nature/culture) and gauge (aesthetics) dove-tail beautifully within the form. Or in Exquisite coppice No. 11, a wall piece that hangs from a sickle the sculptor pits the compositional balance of a teasingly anthropomorphic form against the natural force of gravity.

With of the like kind work Lipski presents sculpture that no longer states itself irreducibly as fact, if it were not that rather forces us to question the implications of its form.

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