Ish Lipman & Gongmo Zhou

LSS Paris

“"Contemplation"”

2023 July 1 to July 29

Long Story Short Paris is pleased to present Contemplation, a two-person exhibition of paintings by Ish Lipman and Gongmo Zhou.

Deriving from the Old French contemplacioun, which roughly translates to "religious musing," the modern word

"contemplation," is defined as "the act of looking thoughtfully." To the subtle, yet important tension that resides in the meaning of 'contemplation,' the works of two young artists, who represent vastly different, yet highly complementary approaches, offer a painterly significance.

Ish Lipman, painting from intuition and memory, presents a vision of landscape painting that is as mythic as it is cinematic. Curving shadows extend from his figures, which are often minimized by the suggested enormity of their surroundings. A cove is nestled into a bay, blending into a sunset-all soft angles harmonizing creating an organic magnetism. Beholden to the unchanging, timeless realm inherent in the act of image making, Lipman's hand is ever present in his method of rendering-a direct, active presence.

In Lipman's paintings, scenes from the California coast float into the universal domain. Repeatedly mining its compositional and thematic possibilities, Lipman places a human amidst the expansiveness of nature to simultaneously unsettle and sooth the viewer.

Gongmo Zhou paints people-awash in reflective surfaces, absorbed in screen light, posing knowingly and unknowingly for photos. Working variably between a style that is almost hyperrealistic-close rendering, crisp lines, and vivid tonal contrast-and a blockier rendering, emphasizing mood over details, Zhou's scenes are instantly legible yet taut with hidden presence. Morning light spills in from an open window, a figure barely clad in bedsheets stares at their phone. A man at a desk takes a photograph of a window, while a woman on a bed takes a photo of him taking a photo. Engaging overt eroticism, Gongmo blends categories, switching levels-the nude, belonging to art history slides into the territory of

'nudes' taken by a phone. In Gongmo's paintings moments of desire and intimacy become tinged with longing.

Two kinds of contemplation, from Lipman's timeless naturalism and Gongmo's human-made presentism illustrate the double meaning of the term-a religious inflection and an interpersonal trance.

Ish Lipman (b. 1995, San Francisco, California) is a Los Angeles based painter. Blending imagined landscapes with natural settings derived from the California coast, Lipman explores the timeless qualities of image making. Lipman holds a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Santa Cruz and a Master of Arts from the School of the Art Institute, Chicago

Zhou Gongmo (b. 1993, Yueyang, China) is a painter currently based in Nantes, France. Painting from photographs, and daily life, Zhou rephrases and reframes his subject matter and emphasizes reflective surfaces. He is a recent graduate from the School of Fine Arts of Nantes.