Painters 2015
Meike Lipp
“I prefer paintings with some movement
in them: animals in action or people in
conversation,” says Meike Lipp. One of
the very first paintings she produced at
the Lamu Painters Festival this year was
her scuttling chickens. It captured the colour
and commotion of our plucky friends
that run about the sunny island. This was
Lipp’s first time in Lamu and she was
absolutely mesmerised by, “a completely
different world, where so many cultures
meet and everything happens on water.”
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But Lipp is no stranger to exotic places. In
1988, she travelled for three weeks with
French seamen by container ship, for a
six-month trip to South Africa where she
travelled to Cape Town, Johannesburg
and all over the country, making pastel
drawings of the people in different townships.
The following year, she participated
in a three-month residency programme
in Moscow, where she concentrated on
figurative drawing. A quieter spirit, she is
an adventurer inside. Just last year, Lipp
travelled to Iran to make pastel drawings.
Though Lipp might seem the quiet type,
upon closer acquaintance she is always
making jokes. And she can joke in multiple
languages because Lipp speaks
Russian and Persian (Farsi) and others.
Sometimes shy and docile, and sometimes
mischievous, Lipp was part of
the Norddeutschen Realisten, a group of
North German Realists but her, “art was
not realistic enough,” she giggles. “They
were really particular about what was appropriate.”
Still, Lipp continued painting
impassioned works with a looser hand
than the realists. She does exactly what
she wants!
Lipp studied at the College of Design and the Academy of Fine Arts in Hamburg. Later, she attended the Rijksakademie Amsterdam after which she worked as a freelance artist, producing her wellknown “Slaugherhouse” paintings in Hamburg. She had her first big exhibition in 1985, at Gallery Rose in Hamburg, which still presents her work. She has also exhibited extensively in Germany – mostly in Lübeck, Berlin and Frankfurt.
