Painting

The untitled (2009) painting by Roman Lipski (born in 1969) was purchased for the collection of the National Museum in Szczecin in 2014. It was created in a period, during which the artist developed a distinctive painting style and gained recognition on the international art scene. Lipski has lived in Berlin since 1989. He is an example of a self-made artist. He is largely self-taught, a graduate of the Mechanical Technical High School in in Nowy Dwór Gdański. In the 1990s, he attended painting courses in Berlin's private art schools, while working as an apprentice with Max Neumann. Lipski's career as a painter developed rapidly. The first significant event was the artist's participation in the Festival of Polish Contemporary Painting in 2004 in Szczecin, where he submitted several works, urged by his friends. They were appreciated by art critics, and the unknown painter was dubbed one of the most promising artists of the young generation. Another breakthrough moment in his career did not take long, as Lipski was noticed by Erich Marx – one of the most significant German art collectors, who added Several of Lipski's paintings to his collection. Soon after, Lipski's paintings found their way into numerous public and private collections, mainly in Europe, but also in the United States and China. The painting from the Szczecin collection comes from a period, in which the artist focused on suburban industrial landscapes. The paintings created at this time are the painter’s renditions of photographs taken during numerous trips to Poland and abroad. Lipski does not give titles to his paintings, nor does he connect them with specific places on the map. Rather, his goal is to recreate the poetics of place. He achieves that by using surprising views, static composition, as well as deliberately reduced, dark colour palette. Thanks to these procedures his paintings gain mysterious, melancholic and disturbing aura.

Magdalena Lewoc