East, London
Sam Lipp
Base
Soft OpeningSoft Opening is pleased to present Sam Lipp’s solo presentation Base during Condo London. The exhibition is accompanied by a newly commissioned text from Asa Seresin, which can be read in full on our website and in print at the gallery. “Base looks toward the foundation, to the degraded, stepped-over core of existence. The culmination of a decade’s development of material practice, Sam Lipp’s new series of paintings use the artist’s signature combination of oil on steel, including one work on a steel medical box. A third medium, frottage – Lipp’s distinctive process of mark-making through friction with sidewalk cement – emphasises these paintings’ unusual sturdiness while also testifying to ideas of bodily vulnerability and decay. A term used to describe the sexual rubbing of bodies against each other, frottage denotes the place where the harsh wear of urban existence and the circulation of the libidinal economy meet. In Lipp’s work, the marks left by the abrasion simultaneously resemble the remnants of an incompletely erased idea, the grotesque elegance of self-harm scars, and the ubiquitous wear visible on street signs and other civic infrastructure. Arranged in a filmic sequence, the tripartite colourway system that orders the paintings begins with the earthy and bloody, before moving into greyish tones reminiscent of old videotape, and culminating in overexposed white. The structure the sequence provides hints at an undisclosed narrative, while also asking what the image, placed under the pressure of certain limits, can become. Affixed with screws, the paintings hint toward a utilitarian past while loudly announcing their present status as commodities. Again and again, we are compelled to confront the image as a property relation.” —Asa Seresin Sam Lipp (b. 1989, London, lives and works in New York) has recently had solo exhibitions at Derosia, New York (2025, 2022); Conditions, Toronto (2024) and Bonny Poon, Paris (2019). Group exhibitions include The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2024–2025); Blue Velvet Projects, Madrid (2025); Antenna Space, Shanghai (2025); Bradley Ertaskiran, Montreal (2024); Conditions, Toronto (2024); Vacancy, Shanghai (2024); Soft Opening, London (2023); Cell Project Space, London (2019); National Portrait Gallery, London (2018); Bundeskunstalle, Bonn, Germany (2019) and Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Espoo, Finland (2018–2019).