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painter · 1949 – 2025
Color is a sacrament of experience. An expatiate of shimmers. Maybe you're absent-mindedly watching how the sun lifts its head. Maybe you step outside, surprised at the way in which peels of burnt orange make themselves known as the sun sets. Maybe you've just gone from Paris to Shoreditch in London and find yourself with gentle color whiplash, the black, white, beige, and grays of the City of Lights being traded for a borough where it feels like 1968 never left. Maybe you're the Catalan painter Antonio Lopez Garcia and find yourself spending time on celluloid watching all the different ways lights can strike a quince tree. There is something about the way color functions as a silent partner to the more well known yet quotidian acts of transubstantiation — bread, wine — and there was no one more interested in color's unarticulated role in our lives than Kip.
Kippi Kostoulakos Fleischer (hereafter referred to in these notes as Kip) would be mortified by the fact that you are here, not just for the the cosmic inconvenience that has been put upon her, but also by the fact that you are looking at this art at all. Why run the risk of showing art — of *performing* — when art is a way of *living?* Why degrade *living* with something as tacky as *performance?* When a comic gets a laugh, they succeed. When a musician finishes a song, we applaud.
This catalog accompanies an exhibition of Kippi’s work held in her home in June 2026, and the website that follows it. It is organized by rooms. There are four: the hallway, the living room, the kitchen, and the studio. Enter and take your time.
sources · contexts · the artist’s own words
the artist, 1976
On the iconostasis
“The iconostasis is for me a powerful childhood memory image which appeared during a contemplation and had a burning staying power. It means that the idea of prayer is now on a more immediate and personal level… My hope is that the paintings will have a hypnotic effect on the viewer so that they become tools for further meditations. I believe that with continual and stubborn explorations of the self we eventually reach a core which is universal. My work searches for this kind of meaning.”
Jed Perl, Paris Without End
On enriching the canon
“Modern artists were drawn to the art of the past — to Corot and Ingres and Poussin — because of the immensely rich formal meanings and metaphors embodied in those earlier works… Balthus was enriching the canon by cracking open the canon. To enrich the canon by cracking open the canon!”
Georges Braque, Cahiers
On color and truth
Form and color do not blend. There is simultaneity.
I am far more concerned about being in tune with nature than copying it.
There is only one thing in art that has value: that which one cannot explain.
Federico García Lorca
On the purpose of art
“The poem, the song, the picture, is only water drawn from the well of the people, and it should be given back to them in a cup of beauty so that they may drink — and in drinking understand themselves.”
Matsuo Bashō, 1687
On constancy and change
The moon glows the same;
it is the drifting cloud forms
make it seem to change.