America

Roman Lipski was actually on his way to America, the land of unlimited opportunity, when in August 1989 he left Poland for Berlin with a rucksack on his back and thirty marks in his pocket, speaking neither German nor English. At first, he says, he did not like it. Coming from the provinces, he experienced culture shock; the multitude of new impressions left the nineteen-year-old disoriented. The first Berliners he met were the highly formal and unfriendly officials at the office where he applied for permanent residence. He wanted to leave the large, unfamiliar city as quickly as possible and even found a reasonably tolerable job as a sailor on a cargo ship. Shortly before it was due to sail, however, he decided to stay.

Following the upheaval precipitated in part by events in Poland, Berlin became a laboratory in which its character was continually redefined. The fall of the Wall and its consequences profoundly altered the image of this formerly isolated metropolis, opening new perspectives and routes — especially towards Eastern Europe — and, internationally, creating a sense of a new pioneering era. Roman Lipski, too, surrendered to this current and allowed himself to be drawn in. It proved a good choice: “Berlin”, the artist says, “has always been good to me.”

The most varied visions converge in the myth of Berlin: a free and progressive place where new forms, things and structures arise, but also a place of decay, which creates space for the new. Moreover, the profound structural and social transformations of recent years have called seemingly self-evident categories into question and brought together worlds previously alien to one another. This feeling was especially characteristic of Berlin immediately after the turning point. People who under other circumstances would never have met encountered one another and began to talk. “Once I even found myself in a car with Friedrich von Weizsäcker. He was very friendly and full of interest,” Roman Lipski recalls with a smile.

Since the city opened up, Berlin has become a kind of laboratory of highly diverse experiences for artists from all over the world. It sensitively registers new visual impressions, urban change and formal experiments. Roman Lipski’s work is an aesthetic translation of this constantly changing environment, which also forms the basis of the artist’s personal world. Berlin is therefore not only a temporary homeland for him but, above all, a space for action.

The large number of unused buildings and financial demands extraordinarily low for a major metropolis create relatively comfortable working conditions for young artists. The environment’s distinctive, raw aesthetic is both a daily challenge and a source of inspiration. Like many other artists, Lipski found a studio in a post-industrial space. The walls of the neglected late-nineteenth-century clinker-brick building bear witness to changing times. Once occupied by traditional craft workshops, they now provide working and living space for young artists, architects and graphic designers from all over the world. It is in places like these that effective, professional and international networks of artists are formed. Hidden, progressive centres for the production of contemporary art, music, fashion and design are based here. It is here, far more readily than in traditional institutions, that the “new” can be found.

“If I had not come to Berlin, I would not be a painter today,” Roman Lipski says. “Living in Berlin had an enormous influence on me. Here, in galleries and museums, I could look at painting. I could learn. Here I could fall in love with painting.” And painting has remained his principal concern. His works, characterised by a restrained, objective visual language, resemble reconstructed dreams, directing our gaze towards what is apparently hidden yet always present. On the one hand this underscores their ordinariness; on the other, it allows their visionary power to unfold fully. Lipski’s architectural paintings are based on motifs of metropolitan emptiness and longing, solidity and fragility. They blur the boundary between the real and illusory worlds. His images also reflect a city dweller’s need for silence in the search for oneself. Their ever-present motif of a return to nature becomes a symbol of this longing, as well as of its unattainability amid the metropolitan clamour. If we look for direct references to Berlin in his work, we find none. “What is Berlin about me is that I paint. It has nothing to do with the motifs.”

The artist most readily turns to unspectacular subjects such as tower-block estates on the outskirts of the city, isolated industrial wastelands and clearings. All traces of human presence are absent. His palette is limited, although recently it has been fractured by intense shades of magenta or red that set monochromatic planes ablaze as though in a bath of fire. The result is an absorbing effect of depth and spatial bodies of colour recalling Mark Rothko’s contemplative paintings. Lipski’s biography has left its mark on his artistic practice: his paintings contain buildings that at first glance resemble the prefabricated concrete blocks characteristic of a particular period in Eastern Europe. The quiet pine forests that so impressively define the Eastern European landscape likewise seem to point to the artist’s origins. Yet the way they are depicted leaves them homeless and ambiguous, like apparitions. Roman Lipski avoids locating his works unambiguously. The motifs and places he portrays lack specificity and could “be anywhere — in Berlin, Europe or America”.

These paintings are not, however, created in isolation from the horizon of the artist’s personal experience; they are completely immersed within it. They are projection screens onto which he casts his knowledge, feelings and personal associations with a given place. They are consequently never faithful reflections. The artist condenses their statement into a motif, using the means of painting to preserve the incommunicable content of memory. Roman Lipski seeks to create suggestive images open to interpretation rather than to make them specific. As a result, traditionally Romantic motifs — atmospheric skies, vast expanses and mystical forests of immense depth — appear in new colours. The artist avoids placing his work in specific geographical or art-historical contexts and dispenses with additional explanations. He does not impose a way of seeing upon viewers, but allows them to find their own “reality”.

Roman Lipski generally develops his motifs in thematic series, using both photographs and found images as models. Working from models, abandoning detail and reducing the palette lends the image an ephemeral character. Time seems to stand still and dissolve into a peculiar timelessness, emphasised by the painting’s monochrome. The act of painting itself is a continuous process of addition and elimination. Some works, with their rich impasto, recall Anselm Kiefer’s landscapes, while the composition and flatness of Lipski’s more recent paintings in particular evoke the characteristic coolness and distance of the city views of the American chroniclers of society Georgia O’Keeffe and Edward Hopper. Deep horizon lines cut across Lipski’s paintings as though drafted with a ruler. Diffuse, sombre light settles over the landscape like a diaphanous veil. These qualities are the source of the extraordinary intensity with which Lipski approaches his motifs. The unrepresentable suddenly comes within reach. The paintings’ power lies in a suggestive intuition that, bordering on fulfilment, opens the space of the new.

Roman Lipski’s works arise from the conviction that no final image of life exists. Since life is the sum of all experiences and realities, a representation can convey at most one shade or aspect of it. The artist combines Berlin’s distinctive monochromatic atmosphere with images supplied by memory. His paintings are a passionate response to the disenchantment of a technologised world and its materialism stripped of mystery. Lipski is drawn to the distance of both future and past, to opposites, labyrinths of reflection and the unconscious. As life itself suggests, Roman Lipski neither wishes nor is able to answer the questions of our time through his artistic practice. Instead, he offers something else: moments of tranquillity and poetry.

America is no longer his promised land, although he has visited it several times. He liked it there, he says, but he feels better in Berlin.

Berlin, April 2010

*Dr Friederike Nymphius is a curator of international corporate collections of contemporary art. She completed her doctorate at Universität der Künste Berlin. Since 2004 she has been curator at CCA, Kunsthalle Andratx and Art Foundation Mallorca. In 2006 she curated the special exhibition Big City Lab during Art Forum Berlin. Since 2009 she has run Nymphius Projekte, an exhibition space in Berlin whose shows have included artists such as Andreas Golinski, Steven Parrino, Gerold Miller, Katja Strunz, Ida Ekblad and Manfred Pernice. Her writing has appeared in more than sixty international catalogues and monographs.

Translated from German into Polish by Krzysztof Pijarski