Donald Lipski (American, born 1947)

Donald Lipski (American, born 1947). Ball? Ball! Wall? Wall!, 1994 , 55 steel marine buoys , 66 × 66 × 3600 inches. , Donald Lipski's work explores how context transforms the meaning of ready-made objects, through a whimsical combination of materials and site. Lipski's approach to art is mainly conceptual; he seeks to express ideas through not only the flaked rust of his chosen material but also to invite speculation by way of the associations that viewers might make in response to them. Ball? Ball! Wall? Wall!, 1994, is a 300-foot long sculpture in which Minimalism's simplicity of form and Surrealism's scale shifts and object placement collide in unexpected landscape., Lipski also mines the humor and irony commonly found in Surrealism, an approach that merges the bizarre with the mundane as he treats examples of monumental instrumental production as if they are much smaller consumer products. Ball? Ball! Wall? Wall!, resembles a row of soccer balls, office desktop toy or a pearl necklace, but the parts are recycled steel ocean buoys, each one five feet in diameter and weighing 650 pounds. This formerly sea-worthy but now land-locked reclamation project embodies Lipski's interest in combining what he calls "stuff." In Libski's act of "reassembling the world," the collision of the beached marine forms and their association with smaller objects become the artist's way of thinking through the inner world of play and the outer world of reality.