Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery is pleased to present The Falls, Jennifer J. Lee’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery. The show will feature eleven new photorealistic paintings on jute, continuing Lee’s exploration of a contemporary consciousness saturated with images. The paintings create a through-line from historic practices of creating pictures with oil paint to taking photographs and snapshots, through our current era with its endless proliferation of digital images.
Born in 1977 to first-generation Korean immigrants in Lewiston, NY, Lee grew up making regular family visits to nearby Niagara Falls. These childhood encounters made an indelible impression, as something of the vast magnitude and symbolism of the falls can paradoxically be easily contained and reproduced as postcards and tourist photos. This tension serves as a foundational theme in Lee’s new paintings. The works in this exhibition create a personal lexicon of symbolic objects that emerge from the act of looking and the construction of memory, transforming the banality of clichés into something profound. Lee describes the process of transferring pixels to brushstrokes and screens to stretched fabric as a form of waking meditation and sustained observation. She sees kinship in Andy Warhol’s single-perspective films, such as Sleep, Eat, and Empire, adapting her artistic predecessor’s contemplative focus to a digital age inundated with scrolling images and screens.
Jennifer J. Lee lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Her work is currently included in Ordinary People: Photorealism and the Work of Art since 1968, a group show at The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, CA. Recent institutional exhibitions also include Small Fixations at the Fondazione ICA Milano, Particularities at the X Museum, Beijing, China and La Mer Imaginaire at Fondation Carmignac, France. Lee has recently participated in gallery exhibitions at The Sunday Painter in London, Chris Sharp Gallery and Chateau Shatto in LA, Super Dakota in Brussels, and Adler Beatty Gallery and Andrew Edlin Gallery in New York. Her work has been written about in many publications including Art in America, Beaux Arts Magazine, Art Agenda, and the New Yorker.
