Young Lee
Night Studio
Artist Reception: May 17th, 6-8 PM
May 18th - June 15th, 2022
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Young Lee invites us in. In Night Studio - the artist’s first solo show with the gallery – she exposes the Pressures of the Artist as Young Woman. She insists on it, boldly repeating the same images from her studio: broken pencils, lazy brushes, bored mugs and cuckoo clocks, angrily ticking down. The objects overwhelm her and Lee’s vulnerabilities are front and center. She sits with the anxiety.
Each work is mise-en-abyme, scenes within scenes where Lee (always her own subject matter, herself often repeated within each painting) is studying or reading, preparing brushes, thinking and seemingly always about to paint.
Of course, the paintings appear before us, as do a series of drawings: her anxieties have materialized, taking us further down the rabbit hole.
Other clues and references are hidden elsewhere. She clutches the existential masterpiece The Pigeon in one work and the ghost of Philip Guston repeatedly haunts her throughout. Look closely and you’ll see images of women treading water, beading with sweat and reading under a spotlight that belongs in an interrogation room. She’s not particularly kind to herself - she’s honest.
It all results a series of sophisticated paintings of interiors, literally and metaphorically, exposing a much darker underbelly than what first appears beyond the cheery palette and cherubic figures. Lee provokes and intrigues us. She captures us. The viewer becomes the voyeur and we can’t stop looking.
Young Lee is a Korean-born, US-based painter who formerly worked in the architectural graphic design field. After discovering a passion for art, she quickly forged a distinct style that is immediately recognizable – imaginative and whimsical yet dark scenes featuring cartoonish characters. Lee received her MFA at New York Academy of Art in 2020. Recent exhibitions include Harmonious Arrangement, Half Gallery (Los Angeles); Villazan Gallery (Madrid) and Frieze Art Fair (NYC) with Half Gallery. Young lives and works in Jersey City, NJ and Atlanta, GA.