Meg Lipke

Broadway is pleased to present Matrilines, the third solo exhibition with New York artist Meg Lipke. Focusing on her wall-hanging sculpture/painting hybrids, Lipke engages dimensional form and expressive mark-making in unique combination.

The works take inspiration from 1970s and 80s Feminist artists like Ree Morton, Howardena Pindell, and Elizabeth Murray who were foundational to Lipke’s early exposure to art. These are artists who broke free of the strictures of the rectangular painting support, jettisoned a pejorative bias against the inclusion of “craft” elements in the work, and generally pushed the boundaries of painting. Lipke has carried this spirit forward, boldly expanding its possibilities while remaining unafraid of a radical, literal softness and incorporating the maternal DNA of her forbears as suggested by the exhibition’s title.

Constructed from cut and sewn canvas, the works are variously stained, dyed and brushed with pigment and then stuffed taut with conventional polyester fill. The result is an alluring combination of domestic comforts and engorged, art-historical viscera. Tight seams delineate radiating curvatures suggesting the crispness of drawing, and a perversion of geometric abstraction that is expanded to include marks invited by ancient cave painting and in the rippled sand of a lake floor, or geological strata. This, along with the asymmetrical perimeters and naturalistic sag of the material, humanizes Lipke’s creations, evoking the tenderness and fallibility of flesh and of nature. As the artist puts it, the works are “simultaneously like bodies and shields, objects and amulets, maps and mazes.”