Lisa Lapinski at UT Austin’s Visual Arts Center
Artist: Lisa Lapinski
Venue: UT Austin’s Visual Arts Center
Exhibition Title: Drunk Hawking
Date: January 24 – March 6, 2020
Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.
Images:
Images courtesy of UT Austin’s Visual Arts Center, Austin. Photos by Sandy Carson and Mark Doroba.
Press Release:
Austin, TX – The Visual Arts Center is pleased to present Lisa Lapinski: Drunk Hawking,
a survey of Houston-based artist Lisa Lapinski, which includes works
from the late 1990s to the present. Lapinski’s sculptures and
two-dimensional works have been informed by a wide-range of referents,
from characters culled from greeting cards and children’s books to
advertisements and industrial design. Though seemingly incongruous and
disparate, they convey a deep interest in how meaning is contingent upon
time and place, never settled or resolved, and always in flux.
Clown [Type Face] (1999) is one of the earliest examples of Lapinski’s work in Drunk Hawking and demonstrates her long-standing interest in experimenting with typographic forms and certain materials, such as wallpaper. Clown [Type Face] includes
a face constructed with a scant number of elements – an asterisk, a
line, and a dot – suggesting that faces can be rendered and emotions can
be conveyed with a few sparse symbols. In I Clown (both versions
from 2008), photographs of almost identical still-lifes composed with
Italian liqueur bottles shaped like clown faces underscore Lapinski’s
interest in play as well as ready-made objects. In more recent works,
such as Little My Chair #3 (2017) and Holly Hobby Lobby Bow #1 (2017), Lapinski appropriates characters from popular culture, and in both instances, children’s books. Holly Hobby Lobby Bow #1 reduces the character of Holly Hobbie
to the form of a quilter’s bow. Perched atop two, pointed insect-like
legs, it is both playful and foreboding. Installed together, the
relationships between distinct objects and ideas produced over
Lapinski’s career are illuminated in new ways, underscoring the artist’s
interest in semiotics and philosophy, in appropriating signs and
symbols from popular culture, and repurposing and reconfiguring works
from her own oeuvre to new and productive ends.
Suffused with wry humor, Drunk Hawking elucidates
Lapinski’s particular view of contemporary culture as unfixed and rife
with ever-shifting meanings, where mercurial complexities, flaws and
absurdities find common standing with craft, philosophy and language.
This
exhibition is organized by MacKenzie Stevens, director, with Clare
Donnelly, gallery manager, and Kaila Schedeen, 2019–2020 curatorial
fellow, Visual Arts Center.
Lisa Lapinski (b.
1967, Palo Alto, CA) received a BA from University of California, San
Diego (1990) and an MFA from the Art Center College of Design (2000).
She is currently an Assistant Professor of Sculpture at Rice University.
She has had solo exhibitions at Sylvia’s Sculpture Garden, Houston
(2019); Kristina Kite, Los Angeles (2017); BA&D, Dusseldorf (2015);
Johann König, Berlin (2006, 2011, 2014); Taka Ishii Gallery, Kyoto
(2010); Shürmann Berlin (2009); MOCA, Los Angeles (2008); Midway
Contemporary Art (2007); and Richard Telles (2001, 2003, 2008); amongst
others. Lapinski will participate in a two-person exhibition at Jonathan
Hopson Gallery, Houston in January 2020. Her work has been included in
group exhibitions at the Moody Art Center, Houston (2018); Wallspace,
New York (2014); Grimm Gallery, Amsterdam (2014); Marianne Boesky
Gallery, New York (2013); Overduin and Kite, Los Angeles (2011);
Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn (2010); MOCA, Los Angeles (2010); Gladstone
Gallery, New York (2010), the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2009); The
Approach, London (2008); Casey Kaplan Gallery, New York (2007);
Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne (2007); Sprueth Magers Projekte, Munich
(2007); Whitney Museum of Art, New York (2006); Taka Ishii Gallery,
Tokyo (2005); and Galerie Nelson, Paris (2005). She was the recipient of
a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2004.
