Flashback- Jeffrey Gibson at Brooklyn Museum in 2020

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Brooklyn, Collage, Conceptual Art, Glasswork, New York Art Shows, Sculptors / Sculpture
Nov 292024
 

Jeffrey Gibson’s stained glass work above, WHOSE WORLD IS THIS? IT’S YOURS IT’S MINE, 2019, was part of his 2020 exhibition, When Fire Is Applied to a Stone It Cracks at Brooklyn Museum.

From the artist about the work-

The stained-glass piece “WHOSE WORLD IS THIS?” uses a modified lyric from Nas’s 1994 song “The World is Yours“. This traditional stained-glass work proposes that this world is both yours and mine. It’s ours. I want to address the question of who owns one’s identity. I believe that identity is made up of elements of our selves that we want to share and make public and also the public’s reaction and responses to our presented identity. We need to remain in communication and show respect and even celebrate both the differences in our backgrounds as much as we do the similarities. We are stronger together than we are working against one another. Although this can be challenging, the end result is a more peaceful and accepting world where we can all thrive, support one another, and be supported. I chose to work in stained glass because the words and colors can emanate from the materials when light is shown through the piece and reflect onto the floor and surrounding walls-becoming larger than itself.

Recently the US State Department chose Gibson to represent the country at the 2024 Venice Biennale. He is the first Indigenous artist to be selected for a solo US show at the international art exhibition. For more on this exhibition, the BBC has an informative article that also includes quotes from the artist discussing the challenges of being selected for this honor.

Ohio Art Events- Cleveland Art Spaces-78th Street Studios- Third Friday

 Architecture, Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Ceramic Art, Cleveland, Collage, Conceptual Art, Digital Art, Drawing, Fiber Arts, Illustration, Installation Art, Mixed Media, Ohio Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Performance Art, Photographers / Photography, Printmaking, Public Art, Sculptors / Sculpture, Sound Art, Video and Film
Nov 152024
 

78th Street Studios, located in Cleveland, is the largest art and design complex in Northeast Ohio. The building is home to several art galleries, artist studios, performance spaces, and businesses, and is a great place to see local art.

Tonight, 11/15, the complex and several of its creative spaces will be open from 5-9pm for its monthly Third Friday event.

Below are some selections from April of this year.

Work by Mark Yasenchack and paintings by Jenniffer Omaitz

“Love Triangle” by Jenniffer Omaitz

Gallery 202 has a variety of work from local artists for sale and also hosts exhibitions. Above is work from Jennifer Omaitz’s exhibition Where Love Lives and mixed media work by Mark Yasenchack.

Sculptures and installations can be found throughout the building like the light sculpture pictured above by Dana L. Depew.

Rebecca Cross’ installation Rock Cloud, was part of her exhibition Mapping the Sensorial at HEDGE Gallery. The gallery focuses on promoting contemporary artists from Northeast Ohio.

Susan Snipes’ work, pictured above was part of a group exhibition at Understory.

You can also see artists at work in their studios. Above is work by Jessica Mia Vito.

Dawn Tekler encaustic wax paintings like the one pictured above, are on view in her studio.

The painting above is by Laurel Herbold, located outside her studio.

Walking through the halls you can also find artwork hanging outside several of the spaces- like the two paintings below.

David King, “Snow Day”, Oil on aluminum

Scott McIntire, “The Birds”, Enamel on canvas

Los Angeles Art Shows- Art Share L.A.- “Plateaus: Art That Resonates”

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, California Art Shows, Ceramic Art, Collage, Conceptual Art, Drawing, Fiber Arts, Glasswork, Los Angeles Art Shows, Los Angeles Music, Mixed Media, Music, Painting / Painters, Performances, Photographers / Photography, Sculptors / Sculpture
Nov 152024
 

Sculptures by Emily Sudd

Sculptures by Kyung Boon Oh

Photography by Kate Turning

Pictured above are some selections from Plateaus: Art That Resonates, a multisensory group exhibition at Art Share L.A. exploring the dualities of life that artists bring into their work.

From the gallery-

Art Share L.A. is pleased to present Plateaus: Art that Resonates a multidisciplinary and multisensory immersive art exhibition that explores dualities: art and craft, death and life, grief and love, and activity and stillness. These contrasts exist with an interdependent bond, reminding us that bonds are intrinsic and often intertwined partners. In multiple materials, processes, and scales, monument-like creations are revealed through thoughtful burnishing of passion.  The exhibition curated by Stacie B. London features seven visual artists: Amanda Maciel Antunes, Kyong Boon Oh, Hadley Holiday, Soojung Park, Emily Sudd, Kate Turning, and Cheyann Washington, along with additional contributions of ikebana by members of Sogestu Los Angeles, music by Rocco DeLuca, perfume by Lesli Wood (La Curie Eau de Parfume), and seating by Hunter Knight. Through a shared refinement of intentional experimentation with their mediums – acrylic panels, clay, glass, ink, photography, scent, sound, stone, thread, tree stumps, and wire– these artistic achievements reveal work that is brave, meditative, resilient, and vulnerable.

Our five senses inform our experiences and knowledge and assist us in ordering the world. In Plateaus: Art that Resonates the traditional forms of visual art of painting, photography, and sculpture are broadened to include aural art — via music and sound — and olfactory art. These multisensory and immersive pieces enhance the experience of viewing visual art and introduce additional dualities: sight with smell, smell with hearing, and hearing with sight. The expanded human experiences in an art gallery switch the expected experiences and invite the possibility of a familiar experience in a new way, or a breakthrough!

Breakthroughs often occur after long periods of what often seems like stagnation, or a plateau. It’s instinctual to want growth to be a continual upward trend, but instead it’s usually a series of long, flat periods (plateaus) of work with few visible results. Seemingly out of nowhere the plateau makes space for a breakthrough of creativity or growth—an intermittent moment when everything comes together. Instead of focusing on the result, it’s good to get comfortable in the plateau.

The artists and artisans of Plateaus: Art that Resonates use a broad range of approaches and techniques towards creative creations that are examples of how to grapple dualities, navigate the plateaus of life, and share breakthroughs that transmute our awareness of mortality into loving engagements with life and it’s contradictions and opposing perspectives that inspire and infuse life with meaning, immediacy, awareness, and appreciation.

Below are two of the ikebana created by members of Sogetsu Los Angeles.

This exhibition closes this Saturday (11/16) with a closing reception from 6-9pm.

Los Angeles Art Shows- Lisa Williamson at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, California Art Shows, Los Angeles Art Shows, Mixed Media, Sculptors / Sculpture
Nov 142024
 

“OoOoOo”, 2024, Water-based paint, glass particles, maple, aluminum, and lacquer

“New Wave”, 2024, Water-based paint, glass particles, basswood, aluminum, and lacquer

“Ray”, 2024, Water-based paint, glass particles, basswood (left) and “Wavy Earth”, 2024, Water-based paint, glass particles, maple, aluminum, and lacquer

“Chimera”, 2024, Water-based paint, glass particles, basswood, aluminum, and lacquer (left) and “Fields”, 2024, Water-based paint, glass particles, maple, aluminum, and lacquer (right)

“A Bird and a Bud”, 2024, Water-based paint, glass particles, basswood

“Trace”, 2024, Water-based paint, glass particles, maple, aluminum, and lacquer

“Pool”, 2024, Water-based paint, glass particles, basswood, aluminum and lacquer

Shapes create a visual language in Lisa Williamson’s exhibition Hover Land Lover at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in Los Angeles. The hand painted colors accent forms that feel both familiar and strange at once.

From the press release-

With an interest in forming a language through concise material abstraction, Lisa Williamson creates works that are visually precise, physically resonant, and often attune to the spaces in which they are exhibited. For Hover Land Lover, the artist presents a series of painted wall reliefs and sculptures that convey language as a series of formal compressions — of landscape, of architecture, and of figuration. At once systematic and intuitive, Williamson tunes and calibrates material space, in that of her individual works and in their relationship to one another within the gallery.

Central to the exhibition is a series of machine-carved basswood relief sculptures that are mounted to aluminum and painted by hand in layers of semi-transparent shimmering metallics, contrasted by surfaces of densely saturated color. Shifting in scale from vast horizontal expanses to modest head or page size abstractions, each work punctuates space and impresses an energetic chromatic charge. Wrapping around the galleries, the artist relates the installation of these works to the structure of a sentence or to that of an imagined morse code. Installed with “room to breathe”, Williamson carefully considers the sculptures’ relationship to the walls and connection to the surrounding architecture, rhythmically creating a conversation between each form and the space they occupy.

In the metallic silver-blue relief, New Wave, the sculpture echoes a long and narrow wave, a line drawing, a curtain, or a vibration. In juxtaposition is the compact relief, Fields, a concentrated bolt of color in which three horizontal bars of vivid green float before a gold infused bronze-metallic ground. Inventing subtle color associations and complex painted surfaces through her incorporation of glass and metallic particles, Williamson’s sculptures catch light and perceptually shift as one moves around each work. Groover is a direct nod to this act of tuning as a pattern of black dials reminiscent of stereo knobs protrude from a glimmering cream block. Hovering in the galleries, Williamson’s reliefs each convey a particular optical frequency — autonomous forms that hold space — at once expressive in their physicality while also maintaining a certain level of interiority, opacity, or resistance.

In a series of vertical sculptures, the artist draws from leveling or navigational tools such as plumb bobs, fishing bobbers, and pins. Human in scale, each upright form personifies balance and the demarcation of space. Situated in conversation with Williamson’s reliefs, these works disrupt the horizontality of the exhibition and instead “drop in”. Ray is a tall and tapered pin that is bifurcated by warm and cool tones, with alternating sections of opacity and luminosity. Drawing from a ray or beam of light, this work exemplifies the active nature of Williamson’s painted forms as glass particles reveal a non-static and light-responsive surface. In the diptych, A Bird and a Bud, Williamson inverts two identical forms and reorients her approach to color within each. Standing together, these animated sculptures conflate nature and figure, as an after-image of color casts against the wall to activate the surrounding space. Regarding precision as an expressive gesture and calibration as a mode of production, Williamson imbues her forms with character and locates a distinct formal resonance, softening the line between painting and sculpture, language and object.

This exhibition closes 11/16/24.

Delaware Art Shows- “Awakening” at Chris White Gallery in Wilmington

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Delaware, Drawing, Fiber Arts, Illustration, Mixed Media, Painting / Painters, Printmaking, Sculptors / Sculpture, Wilmington
Nov 012024
 

Work by Jani Duerr (left) and Yarissa Luna (right)

Work by Jess Slavic (left) and Andy Vible (right)

Work by Andy Vible (left) and Seth Pala (right)

Work by Roderick Hidalgo II

Tonight is the closing reception for Awakening at Chris White Gallery in Wilmington, Delaware, curated by Seth Pala of Alone Time. The exhibition included 27 artists and 141 pieces of art.

Below is a list of the artists from the gallery’s website-

This event is part of Wilmington’s First Friday Art Loop, an event highlighting the city’s arts and cultural scene.

 

 

 

Los Angeles Art Shows- “Against Dystopia” at Diane Rosenstein

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Ceramic Art, Collage, Conceptual Art, Digital Art, Drawing, Fiber Arts, Installation Art, Los Angeles Art Shows, Mixed Media, Painting / Painters, Photographers / Photography, Printmaking, Sculptors / Sculpture
Oct 312024
 

Adrienne Elise Tarver

Cara Despain

Cara Despain

Ashanti Chaplin

Ray Anthony Barrett

Ray Anthony Barrett

Olivia “LIT LIV” Morgan

One room of the gallery with Margaret Griffith sculpture (center)

Jane Chang Mi

Andrae Green (paintings) and Phoebe Collings-James (sculpture)

Andrae Green

Margaret Griffith

Margaret Griffith (detail)

Against Dystopia, the group exhibition at Diane Rosenstein curated by niko w. okuro, presents a variety of interesting work that speaks to the times we are living in.

The exhibition includes ten international artists representing twelve cities across the United Kingdom, Jamaica, and all five regions of the United States-  Ray Anthony Barrett, Ashanti Chaplin, Phoebe Collings-James, Cara Despain, Andrae Green, Margaret Griffith, Jane Chang Mi, Olivia “LIT LIV” Morgan, Esteban Ramón Pérez, and Adrienne Elise Tarver.

From the gallery-

Presented on the eve of the 2024 presidential election, Against Dystopia is ‘a far-reaching exhibition, both in terms of the diverse backgrounds and approaches of its featured artists, and the social, cultural, and geographic ecosystems those artists represent and critique,’ writes okoro, who is based in New Haven, CT. The exhibition ‘features artworks that inhabit a spectrum of anti-dystopian thought, from mobilizing conceptualism to overcome historic traumas and the precarity of the present, to envisioning future utopias against seemingly insurmountable odds.’

Against Dystopia transforms fear and anxiety surrounding the uncertainty of our shared future into a tangible site of hope—one where collective memory reminds us of our agency to enact change today, and rich cultural traditions empower us to imagine alternative futures. Of significance is the inclusion of artists who identify as multi hyphenates, playing numerous social roles within their communities, such as advocate, change agent, chef, documentarian, educator, father, filmmaker, mother, musician, oceanographer, researcher, and too many more to name.

Artworks are grouped into three thematic sections, each of which explores creative strategies of resistance and works against dystopia at all costs: field research, symbolic interactionism, and speculative fiction.

Ray Anthony Barrett (Missouri), Ashanti Chaplin (Oklahoma), Cara Despain (Utah/Florida), and Jane Chang Mi (Hawai‘i/California) use field research to map histories of frontierism, settler colonialism, and land politics onto ecological and socioeconomic systems today. With a focus on listening to the land and sea to both unearth and atone for difficult truths, these artists name and dismantle dystopian practices on the path to reconciliation. Embracing an appreciation for both hyperlocal traditions and the tenets of global citizenship, each underscores our shared duty to ensuring ecocultural sustainability and Earth’s habitability for future generations.

While Margaret Griffith (California), Olivia Morgan (New York), and Adrienne Elise Tarver (New York) work through markedly different mediums and styles, they share a fearlessness in addressing ongoing tensions and questions surfaced amidst the political firestorm of 2020. Embracing tenets of symbolic interactionism, or the theory that individuals shape and are shaped by society through daily interactions and the co-creation of meaning from symbols, these artists remind us of the power of human connection to bridge difference. Each steers towards social cohesion by processing collective grief and the enduring impacts of the 2020 presidential election, the proliferation of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter Movement respectively. Whereas Morgan and Griffith subvert symbols that often polarize rather than unite us within physical space—such as fences, face masks, and smartphones—Tarver reaches into the past to pull forth reimagined symbols that speak to our spiritual interdependence.

Phoebe Colling-James (United Kingdom), Andrae Green (Massachusetts/Jamaica) and Esteban Ramón Pérez (California) boldly envision alternative realities by using speculative fiction and symbolic allegory to sew threads of connection across time and space. Each resists linearity and subverts narrative tropes to instead materialize the fluid spiritual dimensions of lived experience. Through their layered ceramics, paintings, and sculptures, these artists mine the depths of their respective Jamaican/British, Jamaican/American, and Chicanx heritages to comment more broadly on social conditions today, prompting us to dream beyond what’s readily visible or knowable.

Against Dystopia opens concurrently with The Getty’s Pacific Standard Time: Art x Science x LA, which similarly explores, “opportunities for civic dialogue around some of the most urgent problems of our time by exploring past and present connections between art and science.” By convening an international group of visionary artists to help initiate these dialogues, Against Dystopia prompts viewers to pursue deeper understanding of shared challenges and solutions, on both the micro and macro levels.’

This exhibition closes 11/2/24.

 

 

Los Angeles Art Shows- Brian Rochefort at Sean Kelly

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, California Art Shows, Ceramic Art, Los Angeles Art Shows, Mixed Media, Sculptors / Sculpture
Oct 302024
 

Brian Rochefort’s ceramic sculptures for Staring at the Moon at Sean Kelly gallery are an incredible mix of textures and colors. Based on his travels to several natural environments around the world, the work combines the familiar with the unusual to form fascinating results.

From the gallery-

Brian Rochefort’s mixed-media sculptures incorporate a variety of different textures, surfaces and colors to create rich, otherworldly forms. Referencing his travels to some of the most remote parts of the planet, such as the Amazon Rainforest, the Galápagos Islands, and the Ngorongoro Crater, in Tanzania, he internalizes and translates his experiences in these secluded, ancient landscapes into potent sculptural forms.

Rochefort’s sculptures are built up in a unique process of layering, wherein the initial form undergoes multiple firings. Between each firing, he airbrushes the works and applies glazes, many of which he has developed himself through extensive experimentation. This process pushes the technical limits of ceramics in pursuit of evocative, otherworldly new forms. As he states, “Some of the most successful pieces that I’ve done in the past have been works that I’ve built up too fast… but somehow I’ve managed to save the form, and it turns into a different monster.” He works intuitively to build a composition, not unlike an abstract painter, and cites artists such as Albert Oehlen, Joan Mitchell, Franz West, and even photographer Aaron Siskind as influences for their daring deployment of color and texture. His virtuosic control of his medium is tempered by the element of chance inherent to the process of firing the sculpture. In this way, the completed works are the result of a dynamic interplay between his highly developed technique, the distinctive character of each sculpture, and ultimately chance.

Rochefort is equally inspired by his travels to remote and untouched ecosystems, such as barrier reefs and rainforests. A vital form of inspiration for him, the rare and vibrant natural forms found in such locations are apparent in the works. His intent, however, is not to directly represent the landscapes that he visits, a task he describes as “nearly impossible to do.” The sculptures take on the formal qualities of the landscapes through an almost volcanic layering of form upon form, color upon color, and texture upon texture, ultimately blooming into vivid, texturally sumptuous works. His larger freestanding works, which he refers to as Craters, evoke the fundamental quality of his sculptures: a powerful moment of contact with something deeply elemental and otherworldly.

The gallery also posted the video below where he discusses the work.

This exhibition closes 11/2/24.

Los Angeles Art Shows- Shirazeh Houshiary at Lisson

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, California Art Shows, Conceptual Art, Drawing, Los Angeles Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Sculptors / Sculpture
Oct 292024
 

“Earth Lament”, 2023, Pigment and pencil on Aquacryl on canvas and aluminium

“Earth Lament”, 2023,Pigment and pencil on Aquacryl on canvas and aluminium (detail)

“So Far So Near”, 2024, Pigment and pencil on Aquacryl on canvas and aluminium

“So Far So Near”, 2024, Pigment and pencil on Aquacryl on canvas and aluminium (detail)

“Cicada”, 2023, Pigment and pencil on Aquacryl on canvas and aluminium

Currently at Lisson Gallery is Shirazeh Houshiary: The Sound of One Hand, an exhibition of the artist’s new and recent work. For the paintings she combined distinct color formations with intricate patterns drawn on the surface using pencil. The details are astounding when seen up close.

From the press release-

For her first solo show in Los Angeles for over a decade, the British artist Shirazeh Houshiary presents new and recent works, exploring the origins of life and the mysteries of the cosmos, from a microscopic cellular level, to the stratospheric phenomenon of the aurora borealis. The show’s title relates to a Zen Buddhist teaching that instructs the student to listen to the sound of one hand clapping, in order to open their mind to such a possibility and transcend the constraints of the physical body. Despite not being a Zen practitioner, Houshiary realised that her work revolves around the insistent sound made by one of her hands, making tiny, looping, scratched marks in pencil onto large aluminum surfaces, building up worlds through the silence of her inscribed words.

Houshiary’s abstract paintings emerge from an initial pour of liquid color that floods the surface in irregular pools, before she then covers these areas with her own calligraphic gestures in graphite, which are in fact tiny repetitions of the Arabic phrases: “I am” and “I am not”, which she also likens to the natural act of inhaling and exhaling. For one of the two largest works in the show, entitled Enchanter (2024), Houshiary applies red pigment and pencil to a black ground in five ring shapes, recalling structures of carbon particles linked in a chain. Matching this in scale but cooler in tone, is the painting Earth Lament (2023), with two silhouetted blue figures that somehow materialized from the sedimented pigment, one appearing to soar and the other seemingly being dragged down. This accidental figuration also occurs in the work Cicada (2023), which could just as easily be a depiction of the wings of this insect as it could be a representation of its rhythmic song. At the other end of the scale are the galactic indigo swirls of So Far So Near (2024) and the bands of ethereal light crisscrossing the work titled Aurora (2023), recalling those seen occasionally streaking across a night sky.

Occupying the floor is a sculptural installation in nine parts, made from an open latticework of aluminum bricks in blue and green hues, each with the same footprint, but all at different heights, growing at increments of one layer at a time (the shortest has five layers, the highest thirteen). Entitled Maelstrom (2022), these curved forms, both hard and supple at the same time, recall not only the molecular structures of the red painting Enchanter, or “that primeval storm within the spiral of creation where something grows,” as the artist puts it, but also the shape of the ouroboros snake eating its own tail.

A second sculpture, seemingly another form defying logic and gravity, bursts from the wall. Its two sinuous, entangled lines are the artist’s approximation of the movement of a solitary wave – lending it the name Soliton (2024) – which is a type of swelling or surging motion that is not dependent on previous pulses, or followed by other waves. From such unfathomable objects, to minute molecules and gigantic expanses of space, Houshiary’s artworks represent a journey through everything from the chaos and messiness of the Big Bang to the silent contemplation of the resulting energies that surround every one of us.

This exhibition closes 11/2/24.

NYC Art Shows- Petrit Halilaj at The Metropolitan Museum of Art

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Conceptual Art, Installation Art, New York Art Shows, Sculptors / Sculpture
Oct 242024
 

For Petrit Halilaj‘s installation Abatare at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, he used children’s doodles found on desks in his former school in Kosovo to create  sculptures that bring these drawings to life around the outdoor garden. As a former refugee these drawings he found were personal to him and you can sense that in the way they are grouped together and his use of birds and flowers.

From the museum-

Halilaj was inspired by children’s doodles, drawings, and scribblings found on desks at the school he attended in Runik, Kosovo. For The Met commission, he expanded his research to other schools in Albania and countries from the former Yugoslavia, which are now undergoing significant cultural and sociopolitical change. Furtive drawings from kids’ desks have been enlarged into three-dimensional metal sculptures, each retaining the trace of the original. Together, they bring to public view the collective memory and imaginative power of generations of students whose lives were marked by traumatic conflicts and territorial divisions. Kosovo experienced the last of a series of wars in the Balkan region in the 1990s, during which many children were denied access to education on ideological grounds. Abetare borrows its title from the book the artist and his peers used to learn the alphabet at school, each letter linked to a lesson in pictures and text.

In Abetare, culturally specific references to different political ideologies, religions, and local heroes coexist with more universal symbols and playful nods to pop culture, art history, and sports. Spread around The Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden, the “drawings in space” merge with the surrounding architecture and landscape to create a multivocal scenography with an open-ended narrative. A celebration of the shared impulse for personal expression and mark making, Abetare is an opportunity for discovery and an invitation to expand our capacity to imagine transformative futures.

In the video below from The Met, Halilaj discusses the work with curator Iria Candela, including the discovery of the desks, and shares some of his personal history.

This exhibition closes 10/27/24.

Los Angeles Art Shows- Austin Lee at Jeffrey Deitch

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, California Art Shows, Digital Art, Los Angeles Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Sculptors / Sculpture, Video and Film
Oct 232024
 

Austin Lee’s uses a combination of technology and traditional artistic techniques to create work in a variety of mediums for Psychomachia, his latest exhibition at Jeffrey Deitch. The saturated colors in his paintings (and the blue of the center sculpture) make them eye catching, while his subject matter creates, at times, a feeling of unease.

From the gallery-

Austin Lee knows how to render human emotion. Through a unique process that has defined his career, Lee explores human psychology and emotions by integrating software technologies with traditional methods of artmaking to produce vibrant paintings, sculptures and video works. Psychomachia marks Lee’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles in eight years and third exhibition with Jeffrey Deitch.

Lee’s work explores the hyperreality of social media and the internet, and, in this exhibition, he continues to explore the complexity of human connection that can be refracted through our digital age. He uses 3-D and virtual reality software to make drawings that are then painted on canvases with airbrush or fabricated in materials like resin and bronze. Lee turns inward and examines his own raw emotions through saturated hues and uncanny images.

The exhibition also draws inspiration from a transformative visit Lee made to the Giotto Chapel in Padua, Italy, where he was inspired by painted scenes from the 14th-century poem Psychomachia by Prudentius. The poem, which depicts the allegorical battle between virtues and vices for control over the human soul, served as an important source for several paintings in the exhibition. Some paintings show imagery that is directly pulled from the Chapel’s walls, while other paintings are quiet references to familiar symbols, like animals and families. Lion with Blue Eyes (2024), for example, conjures feelings of valiance and strength, whereas In Bed (2024) invites visitors to participate in a more unsettling sensation–– the feeling of being vulnerable or being under surveillance.

Central to the exhibition space is Blue Fountain (2022-2024), Lee’s fountain sculpture that was previously exhibited in his solo museum exhibition at the Lotte Museum of Art in Seoul, South Korea in September 2023.

The mezzanine features a series of new video works that continue to explore surveilled environments and the disquieting feelings in the paintings. The animated figures ogle at the viewer from the same viewpoint as reflected in In Bed. It is common for Lee to build upon previous works, placing them in a rich, multidimensional visual world through rendering them in different media.

This exhibition is on view until 10/26/24.

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