11 Sep –
09 Oct 2020
Austin LEE
Aah
Austin LEE
Aah
Austin LEE, flowerbear, 2020. Courtesy Peres Projects, Berlin. Photo: Jacob Krupnick
Peres Projects is pleased to present Aah, Austin Lee’s second solo exhibition at the gallery on the occasion of Gallery Weekend Berlin. The exhibition will present new paintings and sculptures. The works stage a collapse in the distinctions between real and imaginary, digital and physical. In our everyday lives, we move between online and offline space in an increasingly seamless way, in his translation between mediums, Lee’s practice becomes the conduit for bringing the digital into reality.
Austin LEE, Relaxed Guy with Flowers, 2020. Courtesy: Peres Projects, Berlin
Austin LEE, ANGEL, 2019, Courtesy: Peres Projects, Berlin
As Lee assumes this role of transmutator, the paintings and sculptures that comprise this exhibition are concerned with our ways of seeing and being in the world which now also includes the digital lived experience. Lee’s practice plays with how a work can be limited and defined by the tools and technologies that compose it, reflecting on our own experiences of mediation and how these same tools shape and construct our subjectivities.
Playful and childlike, the characters that dominate Lee’s paintings and sculpture operate through a visual language of simple lines, and direct emotion. Speaking across a register familiar to us from childhood, these works locate and acknowledge the formative power of images. Lee borrows this aesthetic language to create new and impossible worlds, and suggests that these realities can exist through digital space.
Lee’s works provide an uncompromisingly optimistic view of our reality, locating transformative power in darkness
Austin LEE, Growth, 2020, Courtesy: Peres Projects, Berlin
Austin LEE, Side Eye, 2020, Courtesy: Peres Projects, Berlin
Austin LEE (b.1983, US) lives and works in New York. He received his MFA in Painting from Yale School of Art and his BFA from Tyler School of Art. Lee’s works start as digital sketches in photoshop and 3D rendering programs. The painstaking translation from the screen to the painted canvas, or sculpted form, firmly roots Lee’s work within our shared art history. In 2019 Lee’s work was included in Wild Metropolis curated by curated by Xu Zhen and Lu Pingyuan at the Powerlong Museum, Shanghai. In 2021, Lee will have a major solo exhibition at the M Woods Museum, Beijing curated by Victor Wang as well as a solo exhibition at Peres Projects, Berlin on the occasion of Berlin Gallery Weekend.
If you like to read on Austin Lee, you may check out the VICE article by Scott Indrisek.