Lee Ufan

Drawing together fourteen paintings from 2016 – 2018, the exhibition debuts most of the works on view. While the brushstrokes in earlier works from the Dialogue series are the result of several applications of a monochromatic mineral pigment built up into a substantial single mark, these new works encompass a broad range of saturated hues. Painted in a highly controlled method, with brushstrokes that relate to the artist’s breath, the works take up to a month or more to complete, and focus on the resonance of space, color, light and tension. In the new paintings, Lee has begun to introduce gestural strokes as well as unaltered expressionistic elements, including dots and specks of paint. The resulting forms invite the audience to participate in a conversation with the internal state of the artist, completing the concept of a dialogue, this series’ namesake.

The unpainted canvas is as vital to the artist’s practice as the painted forms. For Lee, these undisturbed white and creamy white fields are necessary structures to allow the boundaries between the paintings and the space in which they are installed to blur, fostering a conversation from each work to the next, as well as the dialectic expression within the paintings themselves. A harmonious equilibrium and resonance between the visible and the invisible, the made and the unmade, is achieved; as stated by the artist: “A work of art is a site where places of making and not making, painting and not painting, are linked so that they reverberate with one another.”