Painting - is the first individual exhibition by Roman Lipski in the National Museum in Szczecin - Museum of Contemporary Art.

Lipski is a Polish painter who has lived and worked in Berlin since 1989. He debuted in the early 2000s and his first paintings,  powerfully influenced by Max Neumann, showed Lipski’s strong artistic personality.

His art constantly evolves. Starting from expressive compositions, he directs his art towards works which can minimize the anecdotal dimension, showing the artist’s typical repertoire of iconographic motifs: twilight landscapes, lonely, spectral homesteads, postindustrial relics and the alienated human forms which occasionally appear in them. Experiments with color also constitute Lipski’s art. In counterpoint to the productions, dominated by monochromatic colors, from 2007–2008  that are presented in the exhibition, the artist constructs paintings with distinctive color chords.

Although Lipski tends to eliminate the human form his art, paradoxically man and nature remain the dominant topic of his paintings. Even in works in which nature appears the main subject there are traces of human presence and civilized interventions (e.g., aggressive industrial interjections or discreet forest thinning almost completely absorbed by the nature). The tension between the absence of the human being and the overwhelming feeling of man’s role in the worlds that Lipski presents to us, as well as the ability to transgress the banality of selected motifs, create the special aura of his paintings and assist in providing their visual strength.

The cohesion and continuity of Lipski’s dynamically transforming art is maintained by his specific iconography, and by an attitude that enables the artist’s paintings to transcend the horizon of individual and existential experience. 

Magdalena Lewoc