One piece makes the personal nature of these abstractions explicit: Untitled (Formal Issues), composed in oil, graphite and collage, features the artist’s name in thick white script on a black background. They are usually one color, featuring brushy swatches of bubblegum pink (a color Lee favors), pale yellow, turquoise or dark green sometimes paint obscures pencil lines and oily residues. These works teeter between the formless and the biomorphic and are as seductively tactile as the paintings.
Most are contained in three-toned frames, which Lee had fabricated from his own designs, in black, white and light-colored wood, mirroring a color scheme employed in several of the large paintings. Toward the back of the gallery was a salon-style arrangement of small works on paper, card stock or wood. Lee’s canvas is also notable for its loosely stretched corners, giving the impression that the painting has thrown itself together in the heat of the moment.
The presentation recalls Chris Ofili’s use of hardened balls of elephant dung to support some of his paintings. Untitled (Cream Tone #13) rests against the wall on top of two small, hand-sewn pillows. Unconventional installation is a hallmark of Lee’s practice. Unlike Ron Gorchov’s shieldlike paintings that have symmetrical, finely crafted stretchers, these works eschew the sublime in favor of an irreverent humor. The painting’s surface is divided vertically into bright white and cream white, a slight difference highlighted by a cluster of staples that create lines edging upward from the bottom to where the two tones meet. Viewed from the side, Untitled (Cream Tone #1) reveals its hand-sawed skeleton. Three of these canvases have distinctive armatures, which cause the paintings to bulge out in long, smooth curves on the left. Attention flickers between surface and support, sides and edges. Among the materials used in various combinations are oil paint, acrylic, spray enamel, chalk, staples, rubber and collaged fabric. In their scale and imagery, they seemed boldly semiotic, like flags, but also laboriously handmade. The neutral palette was offset in certain works by areas of silver or red.
Composed of discrete sections of white, cream, gray, black and raw linen, the surfaces have simple divisions that form rectangles, triangles and more indeterminate shapes. One wall of the gallery was dominated by 10 paintings on linen (each 69 by 48 inches), divided into two rows. The exhibition featured 14 large paintings (all 2015), and 23 small works (2014-15).
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