Sam Lipp’s paintings draw from a wide range of found images, committing ready-made pictures and the artist’s own photographs to painstaking recreations using a unique process of additive color applied with steel wool. Encompassing directive street signs, Michael Jackson’s transformed face, sexual domination, and sites of civic ordinance, Lipp’s source material exists at the intersection of the body and power. In Lipp’s additive and highly tangible paint application, pin-sized dots of impasto accumulate to create nuanced hues, establishing concrete analogs to fugitive virtual signs. The resulting works are both highly tactile paintings and direct references to the mechanics of screen culture; at once obfuscated by a dappled fog and rigorously precise. Through these effects, the artist underscores the power of visual culture to govern our lived experience, linking pictures and control.

Sam Lipp (b. 1989, London) lives and works in New York. Recent and forthcoming solo exhibitions include Derosia, New York (2022; 2016; 2014); Bonny Poon, Paris (2019); Central Fine, Miami (2015) and Neochrome, Turin (2015). Group exhibitions include Derosia (2021); Cell Project Space, London (2019); Michael Jackson: On the Wall, National Portrait Gallery, London; traveled to Grand Palais, Paris; Bundeskunstalle, Bonn, Germany; and Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Espoo, Finland (2018—2019); Bonny Poon, Paris (2017); Night Gallery, Los Angeles (2016).