Timothy Taylor is pleased to announce the representation of Alice Tippit. The gallery will present a solo exhibition of new work by the artist on the occasion of ADAA’s The Art Show at the Park Avenue Armory in New York this October. In collaboration with Timothy Taylor, which will represent the artist in London, Tippit will continue to be represented by Nicelle Beauchene in New York and Patron in Chicago.

In her canny, hard-edged paintings, Tippit plays with colour, shape, repetition, symmetry, and figure and ground to create images whose meaning is unfixed. She paints vibrant, minimal arrangements of geometries and forms drawn from the art historical traditions of portraiture, still life, and landscape, including flora and fauna, architectural and pastoral elements. Rendered as graphic archetypal symbols, these forms signify with the clarity of street signage, but in the context of the canvas, their meaning becomes evasive. In the peach and burgundy painting Wed (2022), for example, a single humerus bone is held in precarious balance between two swollen ovular forms, evoking conflicting senses of opposition and synthesis, eroticism and gruesomeness. Tippit’s incisive wit is evident in her titles; she employs pun, allusion, and analogy—and engages not only the signifying aspects of a word but also its formal and sonic dimensions—revelling in the linguistic slippages and dualities that emerge when she pairs such concise titles as Sweep, Saddle, and Vessel with her imagery. These nuanced, often humorous paintings reflect questions about the ways in which systems of classification and definition impact our perception and interpretation of the world. How does a gestalt emerge? Can multiple perspectives be held by a viewer at once? How might images communicate what language cannot? 

Often, Tippit incorporates feminine forms, whether explicitly biomorphic—voluptuous and pendulous breast or labial shapes—or coded as such—high heels, cats, and roses. “More than anything, what you are seeing is my interest in the literary blazon, which is a poetic device that catalogues the physical attributes of a subject, typically a female one, using comparisons to natural phenomena or rare and beautiful objects,” she has explained. “Metaphor is deeply important to my work.” Most languages, the artist reminds us, reflect and enforce the patriarchal systems from which they emerged—systems that prioritise determination, control, and division and are resistant to ambiguity and flux. Updating René Magritte’s treachery of images, Tippit’s work suggests the expansive worlds of desire and identification that underlie meaning making.