To wrap up from last time on 2023 abstraction, it takes courage to make art in the age of smartphones or maybe folly. Who has the attention span now to look at a painting, much less to complete one?
Meg Lipke cannot so much as round one off in the shape of her iPhone. She never gets past one corner of the custom stretcher. Her image never quite coheres either—or breaks fully away to abstraction. That does, though, make it one smart painting, at Broadway through this past January 14. 
Lipke knows ephemera, but the demands of art as well. She has collaborated with dance in performance, although I must take the gallery’s word for it. Yet her last show made a point of the art object, with stuffed canvas as the ground for paint. She took pleasure in that point, too. Where Senga Nengudi makes performance art and sculpture from sheer fabric, like stockings weighed down by a woman’s body as by a stone, one might cling to Lipke’s for comfort in a cruel art world. She also arranged her painted pillows, parallel and crossing, into larger structures, like rafts just in time for a rescue. Their scale and geometry affirmed, too, their sculptural presence in the gallery.
Were they a little too comforting, and did they leave enough surface area for painting? Her new work responds with acrylic on canvas, up to more than seven feet tall and nine feet across. Only in retrospect can one see a continuity in her designs. Lipke still relies on wiggly black lines, from brief marks to several feet in length. Bright colors and half familiar shapes can then steal the show. A hand print has eyes, combining two marks of the artist, with eyeglasses at their side. Other images suggest anything from sea creatures and butterflies to plants, clouds, and architecture.
She knows, too, the need for attention—and not just from those who cannot look up from their phone. These are big canvases with big, flat colors, like Henri Matisse with a smartphone. One painting has a red check mark at its center, as a final seal of approval. It is her personal seal at that, in work that has nothing in common with computer art for Refik Anadol at MoMA, who claims to have ceded control to artificial intelligence and crypto. The gallery sees her rounded corners as a further link to past work, in its insistence on painting’s mass, but a subtle one. And subtle may be the last word that will occur to anyone facing her buoyant art.
I, too, feel the demands on my attention, as I pass from gallery to gallery, wondering if I can do justice to the art. And nothing is harder to judge than the revival of painting, in that space between representation and abstraction today. Her gallery, in turn, runs to big painting on the edge of installation, as with Edie Fake. It avoids the cheap crowd pleasing of at least one popular downtown gallery I could name, but the risk remains. Are Lipke’s wiggly lines a little too close to cartoons? She stands out all the same, thanks to her rounded corners, ambiguous images, wiggle room, and the curious comforts of the everyday.
One title speaks of cave paintings by (some argue) women, another of Dykes. Still, one need not look to gendered identity and deep history for weight. It is enough to take in the painted image—and to watch it never quite cohere. Its scale shifts often, as the eye crosses whole, and hints of depth collide head on with the flatness. Landscapes, seascapes, and interiors emerge not as accomplished form but as sites for discovery. Their inhabitants are uncertain, but they might be you.
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