Chris Sharp Gallery, newly arrived in Los Angeles, opens its program with CrossLypka, affirming its commitment to practices that blur boundaries and expand form, where clarity and ambiguity coexist.
Partners in both life and practice, Tyler Cross and Kyle Lypka have been working together for nearly a decade. Their sculptures—sometimes freestanding, sometimes mounted on the wall—inhabit a space between austerity and sensuality. At once loamy and oceanic, their surfaces recall coastal geology, as if shaped by wind and water into forms both familiar and elusive.
The silhouettes, often doubled or mirrored, suggest typographies, emblems, or fragments of a lost script. These shapes speak in a language not yet deciphered, evoking an alien semiotics that hovers just beyond reach.
While the work nods toward Donald Judd’s idea of the “specific object,” CrossLypka complicates this lineage through line and surface. Their contours bear the trace of drawing, fluid yet imperfect. Glazes, restrained and essential, are fused with the clay body—thin washes of color that act less as ornament than as residue. The effect is one of clarity: intentional, direct, and quietly monumental.
For all their restraint, the works possess a presence that is bodily, almost animate. They stand as if caught mid-transformation, poised between the natural and the constructed, between language and silence.
CrossLypka is the collaborative practice of Tyler Cross (b. 1992, Lancaster, CA) and Kyle Lypka (b. 1987, Philadelphia, PA). Based in Oakland, the duo has been working together since 2016, exploring ceramics as a medium where drawing, sculpture, and architecture intersect.
Chris Sharp Gallery, founded in 2012, is dedicated to presenting emerging and established contemporary artists, with a focus on practices that challenge form and material through rigor and clarity.
