SUPPORT AS SURFACE AS VOLUME
Meg Lipke: Matrilines Broadway Gallery, New York By Gwenaël Kerlidou
Installation view, Matrilines, courtesy Broadway Gallery, NY.
In these pieces, the labor-intensive stitching, which seems intent on avoiding any straight line, vertical or horizontal, has all but taken the place traditionally assigned to drawing.
New York, November 26, 2025
​
With her current solo-show in New York, Meg Lipke has returned to her signature wall mounted sculptures-paintings hybrids, a concept that she started exploring some ten years ago. In a previous exhibition in the same space in the winter of 2023, she had shown more traditionally stretched canvases, which featured each one rounded corner, but didn’t seem to share quite the same concerns with literal space and volume as the hybrids do.
The new works in this instance can be divided into two main categories: On one side very large, almost monumental and mostly rectangular grids, such as “Slanting Grid, 2025”, reminiscent of large stretchers or of architectural elements such as coffered ceilings but displaying an unexpected soft physicality and framing small wall areas within their negative space openings. These expansive works share the walls with smaller, denser, more self-contained shaped pieces, such as “Primary Landform II, 2025”, which typically do not include exposed wall sections.
​
In either case, large or small, the pieces are constructed from volumetric, stuffed painted canvas parts stitched together in various configurations, without a rigid armature. The fabric is usually sewn in long tubelike curvy shapes, filled from the back with polyurethane foam through slits later closed. Even though some similar hybrid pieces have been installed on the floor in earlier group shows, in this exhibition all the works clearly relate to the wall and hence tend to function primarily as paintings rather than as sculptures.
​
In these pieces, the labor-intensive stitching, which seems intent on avoiding any straight line, vertical or horizontal, has all but taken the place traditionally assigned to drawing. Here it defines organic, visceral shapes, swollen with an untamed primal energy, literally ready to burst at the seams. In turn, the actual act of painting appears to be spread out along the entire fabrication process; The fabric being sometimes partially dyed before stitching and then stained with acrylic paint after assembly. Instead of maintaining the usual clear distinction between fabrication and drawing/painting, these relief-like works are entirely recasting their procedural roles by conflating them into one single continuous gesture. Both drawing and painting are inseparable from and part and parcel of the elaboration process right from the beginning of each piece. In turn, they imbue the entire fabrication process with a creative flux usually only associated with the working of the surface.
Sedimentary Amulet, 2025, acrylic and cold-water dye on muslin, acid-free PVA, fiber and thread,42 x 33 x 3 inches, courtesy Broadway Gallery, NY.
Matrilines, 2025, acrylic, beeswax resist, dye on muslin, fiber and thread, 108 x 164 x 5 inches, courtesy Broadway Gallery, NY.
As the gallery’s press-release mentions, Lipke’s work is inspired by the precedents of Ree Morton, Howardena Pindell, and Elizabeth Murray -to whom one might safely add Helen Frankenthaler. But beyond this fairly obvious, but perhaps limiting, feminist lineage, what comes across is a sweeping re-reading of Abstraction’s strategies from the sixties and seventies, such as stained, shaped, process oriented or deconstructed painting.
​
For example, besides Howardena Pindell’s articulated grids from the late sixties, Lipke’s large pieces also allude to works by Alan Shields or Al Loving, as well as to Daniel Dezeuze’s “ladders” from the seventies; Flexible deconstructions of the stretcher made of thin wood veneer, unfurling from the wall and curling up on themselves on the floor.
​
A few different art historical threads seem to come together in this show. One of them being Pop art, with references ranging from Claes Oldenburg’s soft sculptures to Nicki de Saint Phalle’s “Nanas”, even if Oldenburg’s soft objects never directly referenced the body and De Saint Phalle’s soft shapes were usually cast in hard resins. Another thread is Eva Hesse’s Process Art rejection of Minimalist straight-line geometry, coupled with her subtext critique of the rigidity of a male-controlled art historical narrative.
​
Yet another thread could link it to the works of Carol Bove, Franz West, Angela de la Cruz and Steven Parrino’s with their crumpled -but still rigid- shapes, and their rebuffing of “hard” geometric abstraction in both Painting and Sculpture. Parrino’s work, which was recently on view at Gagosian, is a good example of the limits of a poignant punk rebellion which selectively questioned the surface, but not the support/stretcher as symbol of its social structure’s inflexibility: Perhaps a symptom of the difficulty, particularly here in the US, where any kind of “Marxist” analysis of social-historical dynamics is unlikely, of questioning the foundations of a social order seen as immutable, especially after the fall of the Berlin wall, when raging Capitalism seemed all but hopelessly unescapable.
​
Lipke is not alone today in reassessing the rigid geometry of the traditional supports. Justin Adian’s soft shaped stuffed paintings, sprayed with high gloss lacquer, which were recently on view across the street at Alex Berns’ newly opened space, also questioned the square angled and hard-edged logic of abstract painting on traditional geometric stretchers. In Adian’s case, his irregularly shaped paintings retain a wood armature, which is subverted by the addition of a layer of foam over it, before being covered with stretched canvas, creating the soft rounded edges the artist is aiming for.
​
A whole line of other artists, such as Rebecca Ward, Sarah Crowner and Ethan Cook are also sewing and stitching canvas (Cook even weaves his own swatches of colored cotton canvas), exploring the physical materiality of the pre-painted surface. Zuriel Waters’ flat shaped paintings, presented on the wall without a stretcher, also come to mind. They all seem to explore similar territories from different angles. But Lipke’s work distinguishes itself from all of them by going beyond the reassessment of the integrity of the surface. It addresses both the support and the surface at the same time and then makes the support both the subject and the object of painting.
​
Despite their shared collapsing of the categories of painting and sculpture onto each other, the main difference between the Post minimalists and Lipke’s work is that she doesn’t share their fascination for industrial materials and processes. Instead, she insists on intensive manual labor, on working the sewing machine. In a word, as much as she blurs the lines between painting and sculpture, she blurs them for what we conventionally consider as the division of labor between Arts and Craft.​
Maternal Grounds, 2025, acrylic and dye on muslin with fiber and thread, 36 x 47 x 3 inches, courtesy Broadway Gallery, NY.
But more than their allegiance to a “craft” approach, what sets these hybrids apart from most abstract paintings is that they recycle sculptural strategies to produce a painting. Labor intensive processes and fabrication methodologies usually belong to the domain of sculpture. But here process is never an end in itself and the painting-sculpture categories themselves are fluid and entirely reversible. Volume morphs into surface which then reverses smoothly back into volume, acknowledging that a painting is also an object, but never just an object, an improbable object which functions here as a volumetric surface rather than a traditionally planar one. Just as painting and drawing are conflated with the fabrication of the support, surface and volume are also one and the same.
​
Fluidity is indeed a kind of leitmotiv in the smaller pieces such as “Channeled Terrain (Lake), 2025” or “Cirrostratic Column, 2025”. These works often take the idea of flowing streams or of the ever-unstable morphing of atmospheric clouds as their inspiration. As such they function as counterpoints to the critique of rigidity in the larger pieces, not just in terms of their size, but also in the development of the show’s argument.
​
A few years ago, during an art residency, Lipke had the chance to visit a paleolithic cave in central France. The experience left a deep imprint on her work, which can be traced to the titles of a few recent works, such as the Bruniquel pieces. In turn, that interest in cave art is also bound to bring to a viewer’s mind “The Interdiction And The Transgression”, Georges Bataille’s seminal 1955 text about the Lascaux discovery. To recap Bataille’s argument very briefly; The definition of the unlawful, the forbidden (l’interdit) by the law is what maintains the cohesion of the social body and the working conditions necessary for the survival of the community. Play and Art, on the other hand, prioritize individual pleasure and joy instead of work and productivity, constantly breaking or transgressing communal laws, while, paradoxically, reinforcing them at the same time. It is via this double contradictory movement that notions of the ritual and of the religious are introduced in the community.
​
It would not be too far-fetched to apply Bataille’s Freudian-anthropologic insights on the dynamics between the rule and its transgression to Lipke’s work. If her pieces do foreground the community building notions of labor, transgression is lurking everywhere: Painters usually do not construct their own support (or when they do so, as with shaped painting, they usually keep support and surface clearly separate), the building of a support is not usually the building of a surface. Volume and surface are incompatible, volume belongs to sculpture, not to painting, etc. All these adding up to repeated transgressions of the many rules that Modernist abstract painters have religiously followed, and done their best not to question, for much too long.
In our times of ever smaller artworks, shrinking studio spaces and soaring rents in the city, not only is it very satisfying to see such large, ambitious pieces relentlessly pushing boundaries, but also to encounter this kind of extensive and wide-ranging re-reading of abstraction, two qualities that we are certainly in dire need of these days.