Jennifer Lee paints depictions of found photography often sourced from internet forums and online shopping sites. Her work is startlingly photo realistic, rendered in an intimate scale that invests familiar objects with a psychological depth. Lee portrays photographs with a sharp self-awareness, painting on thick jute burlap that degrades the mechanical process of photography while perversely simulating it. Lee, a semiotician in a visual sense, chooses her subjects for their availability as collective symbolic objects and deploys them in sequences that produce a kind of quasi syntactical language, hinting at meaning but ultimately resolving themselves into an intuitive poetry. Despite their visual swiftness, these paintings are painstakingly constructed in an effort to pull an image apart and then rebuild it. The slowness and transgression of this process is reminiscent of Warhol's early silent films as well as Vija Celmin's meditative renderings.
Jennifer J. Lee (b.1977) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She holds a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University and an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design. She attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2009. Recent solo exhibitions include Square Dance, Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, New York, NY, 2023; Drop Ceiling, The Sunday Painter, London, UK, 2021; Planet Caravan, Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, New York, 2021; Wallflowers, Chateau Shatto, Los Angeles, 2020; Cold Turkey, La Maison de Rendez-Vous with lulu, Brussels, 2019 and Day Trip, Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, New York, 2019. Recent group exhibitions include, About Painting II, Galerie Rolando Anselmi, Rome, IT, 2022; Small Fixations, Fondazione ICA Milano, Milan, IT, 2022; Ecosystems of Relations, Super Dakota, Brussels, BE, 2022; Particularities, Museum X, Beijing, China 2021; Halcyon and On and On, Franz Kaka Gallery, Toronto, 2021; La Mer imaginaire, Foundation Carmignac, Villa Carmignac, Porquerolles, France 2021; A Cloth Over a Birdcage, Chateau Shatto, Los Angeles, 2019; Double Play, The Pit with Leftfield Gallery, Los Angeles, 2019 and Last Night I Wore a Costume, curated by Lisa Cooley, LX Gallery, New York, 2019.