School of Art Newsletter Fall 07 vol. 2 issue 1

NOW: Professor Lawrence Gipe

For the past 15 years, Lawrence Gipe has pursued a project concerned with demonstrating the porous and interchangeable nature of authoritarian tropes throughout the 20th-century. He addresses how these tropes manifested visually in mass-produced propaganda by re-enacting them in the context of painting.  Gipe was recently published in the August 2007 issue of Harper’s Magazine for his painting Iran, 1946. The painting, part of his January 2007 exhibition, One Picture and the Next Three, at Alexander Gray Associates, depicts armed Qashqai tribesmen on horseback migrating across Persia.  Here, Gipe re-represents four archival photographic images as oil paintings, continuing his strategy of severing historical images from their original, politically-charged contexts.