Marcelo Cipis was born in São Paulo, in 1959. Graduated in architecture at FAU USP, he began his activities as an editorial illustrator in 1977. In 1982, he lived a life changing season in Europe, after visiting several museums he began to see painting as he had never seen before, he falls in love with the pictorial depict, the lines, brush strokes, and the uniqueness that differs painting from graphic work and from the reproduction of books and magazines. There, he decides that he wants to work as a visual artist, in the broadest sense of the word.
Back in São Paulo, begins a painting mentoring with Dudi Maia Rosa. He participates at contemporary art salons and holds his first solo exhibitions, however he continues to make illustrations, that illustrate major magazines and books over the years, has been a great success.
In 1991, he presented the iconic installation “Cipis Transworld Art Industry & Commerce” at the 21st São Paulo International Biennial, where he created a booth of a fictional multinational company. The idea comes unintentionally, from a joke to the creation of a parallel world, as a self-portrait in which its name is an element to be graphically explored. Cipis produces for the installation works-objects, products and ads that bear his name as a brand, in order to effect the originality of his work, in a clearly neoneodada and post-pop language.
According to the curator Valéria Piccoli, “the Cipis Transworld has become a watershed in the artist’s work. Conducting a speculative process to such a point of radicalism had its consequences and demanded a new positioning from it. Pursuing this proposition implied, in a way, in the abandoning the line of painting. The path chosen by the artist was to turn (at least momentarily) the page of speculation about the artist’s brand, the artwork as a mere object of consumption - and all the implications of his ironic and provocative stance - and to retake a question that seemed most challenging to him at the moment: is it possible to be an artist relying 21 ª Bienal de São Paulo, 1991 only on the use of canvas, brush, shape and color?”
In 2014, he made the “Marcelo Cipis Commercial and Fine Arts” series, assuming more radically his work as a visual artist inserted in the art market, there affirms his presence effectively. He produces works in canvas such as MoMA, TATE and a face that reads Fine Arts.
In 2017, he participates in the group exhibition “Fábula, frisson, melancholia” at the Tomie Ohtake Institute in São Paulo. According to the curator Paulo Miyada, Cipis pays special attention to colors and their tonal combinations. Its colorism can act in the field fills, in the lines of the drawing or even constitute the entire syntax of a painting. Even in the ensemble gathered in the exhibition, where there is a clear predominance of black and white and raw canvas, the colors still assert their presence. In fading vibration, they punctuate the pictorial spaces with affectionate charge and something sensual. They make the course of the eye smooth and soften the histrionic aspects of the narrative universe evoked by Cipis Transworld.
In 2019, Marcelo Cipis launched with Bergamin & Gomide the “Drops” series. Inspired by the old “Misturinhas”, they are small format and colours vibrant canvases, square, just like the drops Dulcora, famous candies during the 1960s and 1970s. The artworks bring back memories of his childhood and trajectory, state the humor, the abstraction, the figurative, the gesture, and consolidate his unique creativity. As the famous candies jingle used to say: “Little squares wrapped one by one, do you want one, do you want one?”