Lawrence Gipe, England, 1946 (Recovery), 2007, oil on canvas,
Approved Images: Lawrence Gipe
Over the last twenty years, Lawrence Gipe’s powerful oil paintings and drawings have focused on irony in images and their mutable power to construct meaning. Gipe appropriates black and white photographs that have been regulated and cleared by a censorship process from ideologically driven archives generated by Nazi Germany (1933-45), East Germany (1949–90), Cold War Russia (1947–89), and Fascist Italy (1922–43), as well as American New Deal and World War II (1935–45), propaganda. His strategy is to paint images that viewers “recognize,” because they resonate with familiarity.
One theme Gipe explores is industrial power: dark, cavernous factories, structured bridges, charging trains, and soaring airplanes are all imbued with a film noir sense of mystery combined with the power of history painting. In such works, Gipe recalls the late nineteenth-century notion of a symbiotic relationship between nature and industrialization and the glorification of the machine. Recently, Gipe has montaged such earlier authoritarian images and ideologies with contemporary icons, in particular American heroes and heroines of the Iraq war. Such re-ordering jars the viewer into re-contextualizing images far too often accepted for an otherwise simplistic reading. Ultimately, it is the power of the image to manifest both good and evil that becomes the potent message in Gipe’s compelling works.
Major funding for this exhibition provided by:
M & I Wealth Management
Joyce Broan
Lodge on the Desert
Contemporary Art Society of the Tucson Museum of Art
