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.

Drawing from the subconscious terrain of dreams, Thomas Zipp’s Der Schlaf IV fabricates a surreal landscape. Using each element of his installation as a referential prop, Zipp weaves together a narrative flirting between reality and fantasy. The painting, depicting a vast rugged landscape, is dwarfed by a foreboding sexuality, and the framed and censored note ends in a trail of tiny punctures. Creating a sense of clinical detachment, Zipp’s installation is accompanied by a large chandelier. Made from fluorescent tubing, its design follows an illogical mathematical proportion, reinforcing the irrational within the pursuit of lucidity.

Through his installations, Thomas Zipp develops fantasy scenarios verging on the eccentric and theatrical.Garnering inspiration from art history, politics, philosophy, and popular culture, Zipp uses unlikely combinations of sources and genres to trigger a sense of familiarity within the absurd. In a composition of two canvases and a drawing, E-Licht is sparsely hung with museum authority. Balancing a large abstraction above a painting of a zeppelin, Zipp uses the ambient qualities of formalism to create fictional space, the utopian aspirations of modernism doubling as a set of subterranean misadventure.