Thomas Zipp | abstract pleasures

BORCH Gallery & Editions are excited to present the result of their first collaboration with Thomas Zipp in Berlin. The exhibition entitled abstract pleasures features the artist’s print project of the same title and is supplemented by the work Blessed (2015, courtesy Galerie Guido W. Baudach, Berlin).

For abstract pleasures, a series of six works, the artist combined photogravure plates with different etching techniques and letters, which he hand-punched into copper plates. The photogravure plates depict various motives, among them a neglected plastic plant from the artist’s studio, and apple, or a table with items scattered over it.

Two of the works depict scenes from Zipp’s performances, which often feature so-called Resusci Anne or Rescue Anne dolls. They were originally invented for reanimation training in the late 1950s and have been mass-produced since the 1960s. The doll’s face was modeled after The Unknown Woman from the Seine (L’Inconnue de la Seine), a young woman who presumably committed suicide, and whose body was found in Paris by the river Seine around 1900. Her death mask was reproduced frequently and became popular among Paris artists and intellectuals of the time because of the face’s exceptional beauty and mysterious smile.

Thomas Zipp’s work is informed by his interest in religion, philosophy, history, and science. He is especially preoccupied with Psychophysics, a subdiscipline of psychology. Psychophysics is the science of the relationship between an individual’s inner sensations and the outer physical stimuli triggering them. Zipp translates the interrelation of subjective experience and objective measurement into the visual tension between photographic material and grids or bits of scientific text.

Press Release / Pressemitteilung