In a series of nine collaged drawings, Zipp introduces the cast of his dystopian narrative: image-figures taken from 20th century politics and culture are transformed into ‘masks’, interchangeable and malleable identities for appropriation. Demonically pierced with rivets for eyes, and donned with popeish black caps they form a council of secretive order, simultaneously menacing and absurd. Their archive-grainy resolution and ominously nonsensical speech bubbles reaffirm a portent of breakdown, dysfunction and malice.

Accompanied by nine paintings, each corresponding to a drawing, Zipp’s abstract tableaux operate as windows of consciousness, revealing the inner ‘truth’ of his characters. Executed in deadened grey-brown palettes, intensely applied masses of hue spill and congeal as psycho-sexual terrains, moribundly fleshy, hairy, and cavernous. Veering from scatological fields of frenzied brushwork, bezoars of coagulated washes, to crudely rendered graphic symbols (a tempest and vulva among them), Zipp approaches painting as an intrinsically physical act, conveying the mystical and primal with quixotic immediacy and instinct.