ESSAYS about Margarita Lypiridou’s Work
AFFINITIES by Avery Larose (2017)
When I first encountered and wrote about Margarita Lypiridou’s paintings six years ago, I was struck by her fragmented, uncanny cityscapes peopled by ethereal, floating figures. Though rarely completely absent from her urban scenes, these were evocations rather than illustrations of people, their anatomy often reduced to a megalith shaped body upon which balanced a smooth, oval head. Painted in hues identical to their surroundings, they became part of the landscape, bleeding into the shifting, ominous cities in which they found themselves.
In the artist’s last series, Affinities, it is as if our perspective has zoomed in, leaving behind the sketchy grid of building and streets and focusing on those figures: the slab-like bodies become lean and graceful, the oval heads acquire a dark sweep of short windblown hair. However, their anonymity lingers: they remain turned away from the viewer, absorbed by a view of a distant city skyline (Un spectacle), a blazing emergence of sunshine (From Rain to Sunshine) or the myriad blues of the sea (Thalassa). Like Caspar David Friedrich’s lonely romantic figures witnessing the sublime in nature, Lypiridou’s figures become surrogates for the viewer… >READ more…> the whole essay AFFINITIES
ADRIFT by Erin Manning (2012)
Years ago, I saw a print very much like this painting (Reunification 48”x72” Margarita Lypiridou, 2012). It was in the context of an MFA critique in Print Media. This earlier work, from the 2007 In Transit series, is called back every time I look at Margarita Lypiridou’s recent series of paintings. A copy of the print now hangs above my staircase and every day as I walk down the stairs, I look at its stillness-in-movement and I wonder at the medium’s capacity to make felt the fullness of movement’s potentiality through the stark black lines of ink. Now, invited to write on the paintings these prints have in some sense become, I find myself returning to the prints and wondering about medium-specificity, wondering about what paint can do that print but gestures toward, and what print can do than painting misses. For there is no question that Lypiridou is both a print-maker and a painter, and that the between of these mediums plays in her technique, in the activation of how movement figures both in the 2007 digital prints from the In Transit series, and in the 2012 series Drift // Dérive.
Technique, as I understand it, is what incites the medium’s potential to come to the fore. Yet technique, the how of working with the singularity of a given platform, is also that, which both makes and unmakes the medium. It brings out its specificity… >READ more…> the whole essay ADRIFT.
ARTIST DEFINED… by Cheryl Kolak Dudek
“What else is the present if not a multi-layered structure made up of memory as well as intention and imagination.” M. Lypiridou
“… philosophy is the art of forming, inventing and fabricating concepts.” Deleuze & Guattari (1991)
“ ‘Memory’ labels a diverse set of cognitive capacities by which we retain information and reconstruct past experiences, usually for present purposes. Memory is one of the most important ways by which our histories animate our current actions and experiences.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (plato.stanford.edu 2010)
Defining consciousness is another way that an artist can mine their creative source. In Margarita Lypiridou’s practice, it may well be her primary process. She strives for, and achieves, a heightened self-awareness through reflection, and by tracing experimental links for analysis and comparison. Repeating motifs, found throughout her artist books, paintings, prints and videos, are cross-referenced and re-contextualized to accumulate meaning and create hyper-textual pictorial narratives. Her project is an autobiographical and philosophical exploration; an existential pictorial narrative created thru and by her experiential filters. >READ more…> the whole essay ARTIST DEFINED…
DWELLING IN THE HAUNTED CITY: Paintings by Margarita Lypiridou by Avery Larose
Melting, atmospheric and ephemeral - at first glance, Margarita Lypiridou’s cityscapes seem to have little in common with the rational, planned urban realms that so many of us call home. Worked up in flaming layers of crimson and gold with flashes of green, or evoking a desert palette of flat blues and sandy beiges, her canvases allude to a city distilled from dreams, existing on the fringes of the familiar grey grid. Unreal and transient, her cities are populated by ghostly figures that perch precariously amongst the hazy buildings, or hover in faceless groups in nebulous streets and plazas; in their uneasy relationship to the urban landscape they occupy, these figures speak to an all-too-real sense of anonymity and dislocation that infects the experience of the modern city. At the same time, these works allude to the transformation and enchantment of urban spaces through the memories, dream and desires of their inhabitants.
With their collapse sense of space, surreal, diffuse lighting, and shifting perspectives, Lypiridou’s cities are pregnant with the uncanny atmosphere of the dream: familiar, and yet somehow strange, mysterious, an vaguely threatening. >READ more…> the whole essay DWELLING IN THE HAUNTED CITY.d