Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Ceramics, sculpture
Website: chrissharpgallery.com/crosslypka
CrossLypka is a collaborative duo comprising Tyler Cross (b. 1992, Lancaster, CA) and Kyle Lypka (b. 1987, Philadelphia, PA), life and creative partners who live and work in Oakland, California. Cross studied design at the San Francisco Art Institute; Lypka had been pursuing figurative sculpture independently. They met online in 2013, began making ceramic vases together in 2016 as a way to spend time with one another, and developed what began as an intimate domestic practice into a significant collaborative sculpture practice. They make their work at an artist residency in Pope Valley, in Napa County. They are represented by Chris Sharp Gallery in Los Angeles and Bureau in New York, and are the recipients of the 2026 SFMOMA SECA Art Award. Their work is held in the permanent collections of KADIST and the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. A solo exhibition of their work will be presented at SFMOMA from December 2026 through May 2027.
CrossLypka begins each work with a simple contour drawing — typically made by Cross — which Lypka then selects and hand-builds into a three-dimensional object from clay. Cross applies the glaze, a mixture of glass and other additives that run and pool according to gravity and heat; the pieces are fired in a bed of sand that fuses with the overflowing molten material, creating an encrusted skirt at each sculpture's base. The process is, as their gallery describes it, a tectonic reverie: material passed between hands, surface spilling its secrets, belly made from line and skin from glass.
The resulting sculptures — both freestanding and wall-mounted — occupy a space between austerity and sensuality, between the geologic and the typographic. Their silhouettes double and butterfly, recalling heraldic shields, Archaic bannerstones, cornices stripped from Victorian buildings, fragments of a lost script. Titles like lave, stisk-find, tar sweet, and d.e.w. perform what the duo calls representational utterances — words that hover at the edge of meaning without resolving into it. KQED described the work as "airy paintings made chunky, an alchemical fusion of delicacy and solidity." Their work sits in productive dialogue with Donald Judd's notion of the specific object — neither painting nor sculpture, but closely related to both.
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