Opening: Orchard Windows Gallery presents Egon Zippel “The Devandalizer”

Opening: Orchard Windows Gallery presents Egon Zippel "The Devandalizer"

Egon Zippel’s most recent work involves recycling “communication” from re-appropriated stickers, tags and other fragments of urban signature found on New York streets. These artifacts of urban life regroup on canvas into defined yet chaotic linear, circular and random images emanating contemporary culture. 

Egon Zippel: Excerpts from an Interview (NYC 2012, by Lin QUIK Felton) 

LF: One has seen your work morph frequently and radically over the years. How do you view your creative self today?

EZ: I am a traditional  HUNTER and GATHERER! I used to go for mushrooms and berries. Now it’s stickers.

LF: Is it painting or conceptual art?

EZ: Does it matter!?! I enjoy roaming and stalking the cacophonous streets, sometimes in the wee hours of Manhattan’s pre-dawn equipped with my ever trusty and sturdy ladder hunting unique stickers that tumble and visually rumble across the borough’s urban crust.

LF: How do these new works take form and represent this reflection of man’s primitive nature to discover and explore?

EZ: Ha! I DEVANDALIZE and PRESERVE. The artworks on display are my collections: trophies. To formulate my idyllic street harvest into art, I manipulate the tags and stickers as painting. The medium is really the message. I like to think that in accordance to the gritty gangster “rules” of graffiti and street art I use a reverse approach: I don’t add, I take. Some taggers I really like a lot,  they are on my “most wanted” list…. 

Egon was born in Timisoara, Rumania 1960. Upon the infamous Nicolai Ceausescu’s rise to power in 1965, Egon’s parents decided that an urgent relocation was necessary. Fleeing the dictatorial wrath of this political piranha, the Zippel family moved to Heidelberg, Germany to begin a life anew. 

Egon studied graphic design at the University of Mannheim; then received a Fulbright Scholarship to Georgetown University, Washington D.C. 1984-85 and the University of Texas, Austin. Later, Egon studied computer graphics at the New York Institute of Technology and maintained postgraduate studies at the Institute for New Media in the Staedel Frankfurt Art Academy. In the early 90ties he moved to Italy and in 1996 back to NYC. Egon Zippel has been residing in the Lower East Side since 2003 and lives and works also in Berlin and Khajuraho, India. 

He believes in destiny and works with chance (and knows that this is a contradiction).

       June 1 – June 7, 2012

      RECEPTION: Monday, June 4, 7-9pm

      37 Orchard St.  [between Canal and Hester]

Opening: Orchard Windows Gallery presents Egon Zippel "The Devandalizer"

Opening: Orchard Windows Gallery presents Egon Zippel "The Devandalizer"

Opening: Orchard Windows Gallery presents Egon Zippel "The Devandalizer"

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