Summary

Lawrence Gipe (b. 1962 in Baltimore, Maryland), is an American painter. He is currently an assistant professor in 2D studies at the University of Arizona.

Gipe derives his paintings from an “irredeemable” image pool of ideological photographs. Since the 1980s, every work has come from an archive of propaganda tracts, social realist photography books and other art “approved” by politically driven authorities. Appropriating imagery from photo journals and magazines from the 1930s to the 1970s, his paintings translate small black and white images into large, visually seductive color works. Radically severed from their original contexts, the intention is for these reinterpretations to actively force the spectator to reconstruct the images' ideological significance.

He has exhibited internationally, including solo museum exhibitions at the Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, CA; Amerika-Haus, Berlin; Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, MA; Kunstverein Düsseldorf; and The Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, VA. His work is in numerous public collections, including the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, San Jose Museum of Art, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Yale University Library, Zimmerli Archive-Rutgers University, Boise Art Museum, Cincinnati Art Museum, and the Norton Museum of Art, Palm Beach.