CHRIS HIPKISS at Galerie Susanne Zander, Cologne

CHRIS HIPKISS, Cho Powered C2, 2013, Mischtechnik auf Papier, 20 x 13cm, Courtesy Delmes & Zander / Galerie Susanne Zander

Chris Hipkiss:

For Us My Cuts

5. September - 21. November 2014

Opening: Friday, 05.09., 6 – 10 pm

Both born in the year of 1964, Alpha and Chris Mason met at age eighteen and quickly became fused by their shared interests and creative aspirations. With two artistic elements – Chris a self-taught draughtsperson and Alpha principally a writer with an academic background – they chose the pseudonym 'Chris Hipkiss', in 1991, for their visual output. From the beginning, the Hipkiss oeuvre has been the product of a symbiotic collaboration, both technically and in terms of inspiration. Birds and landscapes - industrial or bucolic - coded messages, private jokes and fragments of the couple's discussions, political geography, history and the social sciences – all these elements are detectable on close inspection in the drawings created in pencil, silver ink and metal leaf.

Alongside the expansive panoramas, the exhibition “For Us My Cuts” at Galerie Susanne Zander features a special display of smaller works, clear-cut and self-contained fragments from a world translated into the unparalleled Hipkiss lexicon. Painstaking in detail, the powerful mesh of alienating symbolisms is amalgamated with a baffling visual language that is overwhelming, singular and dual at the same time, both male and female, and of a quasi-compulsive precision that is at once freed from all dogmatic constraint.