Thomas Zipp's latest exhibition, "EEEEEEE (God bless the Lord (Auch))," refers to the pseudonym under which Georges Bataille published The Story of the Eye in 1928. Apocalyptic, pornographic, and at times filled with wit, Zipp's "Schlaf-Bildern" (Sleep-Paintings) escort us through a field strewn with Bataillean imagery, a labyrinth of possibilities featuring flowers, bullets, asses, mountains, suns, and fish that look like zeppelins. In Der Schlaf IV (y-drops) (The Sleep IV [y-drops]), 2006, Zipp paints a landscape wherein a gloomy sky resembling a gigantic ass appears about to be impaled by a mountain peak. Zipp's "Sleep" series, painted in acrylic and oil, feature terrains eclipsed in darkness, symbolically echoing Bataille's essay "The Solar Anus." But hanging in front of each of these works are neon chandeliers girded by black-painted wood (E-Licht [E-Light], 2006), illuminating the paintings and their metaphor-laden imagery with an intenseflorescent light. Dispersed throughout the show are repetitive typewritten letters on white sheets of torn paper, textual drawings that sometimes bear traces of bloodlike substances or bold black marks, while on the far side of the gallery, also in black wood, the Latin phrase Mens agitat molem (Mind Moves Matter), 2006, hangs on the wall, providing an erudite center to this transgressive wilderness. Far from a mere homage to Bataille, the exhibition, an energetic and half-absurd juxtaposition of disparate motifs, is refreshing in its hyperbolic threat of imminent disaster and surreal madness.



Zipp's work is infused with a romanticism of history: a wilful appropriation of styles and ideas, revisited, churned over, and mutated for contemporary experimentation. Resurrecting defunct concepts, and invigorating them with new usage, Zipp creates a parallel world envisioning a precarious future-fiction based on revisionist past. Schwartze Ballons is a nine-part installation comprised of paintings, drawings, and sculpture. Central to the piece is a large black structure. Ominous and strange, its ballooning form connotes a malevolent technology, stealth-like in its dead weight. The accompanying abstract drawings suggest scientific inventions that are equally playful and sinister. Painted portraits complete the scene with b-movie flair: dead zombie-like leaders with rivets for eyes add a subtext of evil, both spellbinding and humorous.