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Alex Dipple

Alex Dipple seems to derive her inspiration form prosaic sources, such as daily newspapers, to arrive at something altogether different than a simple skimming of pop culture so often prevalent in contemporary art. This tension between a highly determined source and its re-use as an armature for the support of a phenomenal, painted surface is what is interesting about her work. . Rather that use a tabula rasa for her abstract impulses, Dipple uses already inscribed sources. This is a “given” ground- a shallow apriori that allows for the artist to freely paint without a need for the paint’s application to bear any additional theoretic baggage. Her mode of installation is important too, in extending the painted work into the realm of the phenomenal, almost sculptural object.


There is a certain abject quality to the ephemeral nature of Dipple’s sources in newspapers and other everyday objects, that when painted, figuratively and literally become puckered of a smooth reading. Her work brings up questions of the actual intelligibility of the everyday in contemporary experience. There’s a sense of exhaustion and tragedy in her work that is somewhat rare these days in contemporary art. There is also an attendant poignancy in the artist’s humble attempts to re-paste and reassemble any kind of sense out of the often inscrutable dross of our daily scripts as “given”.