Sam Lipp

Sodom

May 8–June 21, 2025

It was the end of that sublime reign of the *** Empire. The extensive wars of President ***, while draining the state’s treasury and exhausting the substance of the people, nevertheless contained the secret that led to the prosperity of a swarm of those savvy entrepreneurs who are always on the watch for public calamities, which instead of appeasing they promote or invent so as to profit from them all the more. It was during the frenzy of those radiant days that the greatest number of these mysterious fortunes emerged whose origins are as obscure as the lust and debauchery that accompany them¹. 

Night in that dear city, sister Sodom. In 2025, an exhibition of new paintings by Sam Lipp at Derosia. Lipp presents images of bodies dislocated from authority. A painted mugshot of the infamous Ravachol (33 years. Condemned); and pictures of Seconal, a kind of barbiturate (street name reds, dolls) for “Sleep That Makes the Darkness Brief” (Eli Lilly, 1948). The paintings are on steel and are penetrated by the screws from which they hang.

The sodomites exist in relation to His Authority. The sentence carried out is death (Leviticus 20:13). The King James translation of the Old Testament uses “sodomite” for the Hebrew “kadesh” literally “holy man” or “consecrated one.” The Revised Standard later translates the same word as “male cult prostitutes.” The earliest dated biblical passage to interpret the sin of Sodom describes that city’s wickedness only regarding their greed and cruelty to the poor (Ezekiel 16:49). The city destroyed, and by whom.

Sam Lipp (b. 1989, London) lives and works in New York. Recent and forthcoming solo exhibitions include Soft Opening, London (2026, forthcoming); Conditions, Toronto (2024); Derosia, New York (2022; 2016; 2014); Bonny Poon, Paris (2019); Central Fine, Miami (2015) and Neochrome, Turin (2015). Group exhibitions include The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2024–2025); Antenna Space, Shanghai (2025); Bradley Ertaskiran, Montreal (2024); Conditions, Toronto (2024); Vacancy, Shanghai (2024); Soft Opening, London (2023); Cell Project Space, London (2019); Michael Jackson: On the Wall, National Portrait Gallery, London; traveled to Grand Palais, Paris; Bundeskunstalle, Bonn, Germany; and Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Espoo, Finland (2018–2019); Night Gallery, Los Angeles (2016); Fondazione107, Turin (2014).

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¹ The 120 Days of Sodom. The Marquis de Sade (1785). page 1.* 

*Written during Sade’s imprisonment in the Bastille