Visit to ABSOLUTE DARLINGS by Brandon Lipchik at ROBERT GRUNENBERG

Exhibition Date: April 20 – June 15, 2024
Location: ROBERT GRUNENBERG
Opening Hours: Wednesday – Saturday, 12 noon – 6 pm
Address: Marburger Str. 3, 10789 Berlin

“Absolute Darlings“ is Brandon Lipchik’s new series of paintings depicting his closest circle: friends, family members, employees, and creative collaborators. They include his Berlin gallerist Robert Grunenberg, Lipchik’s sister Nicole – or the artist and fashion icon Ivana Vladislava, who is known for masterfully combing haute couture and an anti-fashion in her own extreme style.

As in earlier series by the American artist based in Berlin, the figures were rendered on the computer and then transferred onto the canvas with a brush. Whilst the protagonists in his paintings have so far remained anonymous and faceless, Lipchik claims these as portraits for the first time. In „Absolute Darlings“ his style becomes more naturalistic, gestural and flowing. However, these “portraits” are more like clones, as the subjects are composed of different figures, depicted from different angles and throughout several sessions. “Absolute Darlings” are always an entity consisting of a certain personalities and something like a Frankenstein monster. A sampling of people and moments. Lipchik creates a burlesque, robotic version of the term “network painting” coined in the early 2000s, in which the artists visualize their respective networks in their paintings. In doing so, they want to suggest that painting does not only take place on the canvas, but is simultaneously a social and economic process that additionally shapes a work of art. In Lipchik’s case, this network has not grown but, as in Witness of a Creation, Intertwining Pile in Vines or Android Painter, has been produced synthetically in a kind of paradisiacal science fiction laboratory.” (Text excerpt from the press release by courtesy of ROBERT GRUNENBERG)