VAN HORN is pleased to present two corresponding solo exhibitions of works by Anys Reimann and Meg Lipke.
The exhibitions celebrate working with different media and the resulting forms of expression that interact and reinforce each other.

Meg Lipke describes her soft objects sewn and painted from canvas fabric as painting. Stuffed with polyester, they lie, stand or hang on the wall. Their presence is carried by apparent contradictions: light and heavy, with softness and edges that tell of the exact adherence to structure.

Anys Reimann’s collage-based practice makes it its business to allow fragments to become a whole, always thinking of “hybridity as a fundamental form of construction”. Her works, be they composite and painted works on paper, wood or linen (or even sculptures) allow overlaps and overlaps of form and material to become the centre. The fragment, the one part of many, combines and becomes the whole. The medium is the message. In her artistic practice, Anys Reimann deals with being “different”, with the representation of heterogeneous culturality and what it can mean when social codes are broken and expanded through self-determined representation. Her figures are mostly composed of images of different parts of the bodies of women of different origins. Together, this results in a group of female-coded persons who present themselves with strength, defiance, sensuality and without averting their gaze. The difference between being depicted and a selfdetermined self-presentation becomes immanent here.

Meg Lipke, like Reimann, also allows a unique relationship between medium and materiality to emerge. Since 2014, the artist has abandoned the traditional format of painting and begun sewing canvas fabrics together, stuffing them and painting them. Freed from the stiffness of the stretcher frame, the objects become soft and pliable. “When painting becomes the body, the canvas becomes the skin” Lipke stated in an interview with Catherine Haggarty in 2021. Linked by volume and weight, often with recesses that remind us of the rules of positive and negative space in classical painting, the objects become an anthropomorphic experience. Femininity takes on a very defining role in Meg Lipke’s oeuvre, as much foregrounded by absence (a solo exhibition in 2018 Lipke titled “The Woman in the Painting Has Left”) as pervasive silence can be of beguiling noise.

The female body, captured on countless canvases over the centuries, painted by male hands, seen through male eyes and determined by patriarchal structures, forges a new path as well in Lipke’s painting as in Reimann’s works, which exists detached from frames and boundaries. The body is reimagined and can take its place in this space that is liberated from the design specifications of past times.

What both artists have in common is this physical experience of their works. Lipke’s painting-sculptures and Reimann’s sculpture-collages. Bodies sewn from fabric, faces from paper, from leather, painted with oil and acrylic. It is a process of exhaling, of allowing oneself to move out of the framework attributed from the outside, a concession given to oneself to expand, to grow. Viewing and encountering the works of Anys Reimann and Meg Lipke is a somatic, sensual and multi-dimensional experience.

Text: Clara Stratmann

Meg Lipke was born in Portland, Oregon in 1969 and holds an MFA from Cornell University. Her work is exhibited and reviewed internationally. The artist lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Anys Reimann was born in 1965 to an East Prussian mother and a West African father. She studied sculpture and painting at the Düsseldorf Art Academy. Her works are represented in important private and museum collections. The artist lives and works in Düsseldorf.