Kip Allan Bauersfeld was born in Washington D.C. in 1967.
He attended San Diego State University, the University of
California, Santa Barbara, and the University of California,
Berkeley. Interested in painting as a child, Kip first began
working in oils at the age of seven. In 1989 he dabbled in
performance art and focused his artistic efforts almost exclusively
on painting with words (one
example here). His first show was held in Janurary 2007,
at Kavovarna Galerie, in the famed Lucerna Passage bordering
Wenceslas Square in the center of Prague.
He is inspired by contemporary German painting, Neo Rauch and the "Leipzig
school painters", Gerhard Richter, Cornelia Schleime,
Ena Swansea, Belinda Eaton, Wilhlem Sasnal, Lucien Freud,
Luc Tuymans, and Martin Kippenberger among many others.
Kip lives and works in Prague.
Solo Exhibitions
2007
Czech Republic. January 10-February 10. "Passage
- between Passings and Becomings," Kavovarna Galerie,
Pasaz Lucerna, Prague 1
Czech Republic. May 3 - August 20. "Capture Witheld,"
Ouky Douky Cafe, Holesovice, Prague 7
Czech Republic. May 31- June 15. "The Raw and the
Cooked," Kavovarna Galerie, Pasaz Lucerna, Prague
1
2008
Czech Republic. January 12- present. "Speculum Speculorum
- Contemporary Figurative Painting," CzechInn Cafe,
Vinohrady, Prague 2
Artist's statement
It is a question of possibilities
My work is similar to that of a map maker who labors, one
piece at a time, in the creation of a map with no borders
and no explanatory key, in order to understand where he/she
is now, where he/she has been and where he/she is going. Unlike
conventional maps that define specific places and the spaces
between places, the body of my work can be seen as mapping
the relativity of “passings” and “becomings”
and the endlessly shifting relationship between them.
By “passing”, I mean an incident, something that
has happened, that has been seen or felt, something that has
drawn attention and caught the eye. No matter what the scale,
from the subatomic to the rotations of galaxies, the universe
in which we live is in constant motion. To isolate an incident,
an event, a feeling, an experience, to remove it from the
motion of the world, is likely impossible. My attempts to
do so, to extract an incident from the flows and counter flows
of life, are destined to failure. What I am left with are
fragments, bits of memory, traces of feeling, zeros and ones,
marks on paper, hints of what may have happened. Like leaves
in the stream, these fragments rise and fall, spin, collide,
contradict and compliment, only to disappear over the horizon.
“Becoming” is the possibility of making sense
out of these seemingly random flows and counter flows and
in so doing freeing ourselves to attain definition beyond
that horizon. Even as the ability to know ‘what’
has happened remains elusive, ‘that’ something
has happened exudes a certain degree of clarity. It is upon
this that I begin to arrange my composition, destination unknown.
It is upon this that I rest my eyes.
Questions of meaning, context, possible narrative, sign,
symbol, time and history resonate in the relationship between
multiples of passing and becoming. Instinctively there is
a need for clarity, familiarity and certainty. Yet the closer
I come, the more I discover opacity, enigma and elusiveness.
Inside the paradox, there is beauty, juxtapositions of the
paradox, a tilt this way or that in passing, reveal fragments
of the aesthetic. The contradictions are wonderful, there
is no center, the center can not hold.
