Alice Tippit’s Flute, 2024, is an Intaglio and monoprint in an edition of 12 and printed from a copper plate. While the artist works most often in the form of painting, mixed media on paper, and sculpture, Flute carries into print Tippit’s deeply observant and quietly literary sensibility. In 2016, critic Johanna Fateman described Tippit’s compositions as “unsolvable riddles” with a “cool, formal harmony.”

Tippit offers cues of information, and in works on paper the unworked material itself can have formal significance. Here it serves as both candle and wick, containing the darkness illuminated by the flame; yet the undulating form (in gray ink) surrounding the flame can also be read as a figure, deepening the potential readings for the image. The corporal shape, as with the flame motif, is recurrent in Tippit’s work– to which we might reference her earlier painting, Part; or Shriek, a work on paper. Each with its own narrative potential, they embody a radical strangeness that runs current-like through Tippit’s practice.