Lace Curtain (2021), Oil on jute, 33 × 25.5 cm (13 × 10 inches)
Jennifer J 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, Lewiston, USA lives and works in Brooklyn, USA). In 2000, she received a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University, and in 2010 she received an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. In 2009 she attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Selected solo exhibitions include: Yards, The Sunday Painter, London, UK, 2026; The Falls, Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, New York City, USA, 2025; Square Dance, Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, New York City, USA, 2023; Drop Ceiling, The Sunday Painter, London, UK, 2021; Planet Caravan, Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, New York City, USA, 2021; Wallflowers, Chateau Shatto, Los Angeles, USA, 2020; Cold Turkey, La Maison de Rendez-Vous with lulu, Brussels, Belgium, 2019; Day Trip, Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, New York, 2019. Selected group exhibitions include: Salon, Curated by Matthew Higgs, Lismore Castle Arts, Waterford, Ireland, 2026; Ordinary People: Photorealism and the Work of Art since 1968, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, USA, 2025; About Painting II, Galerie Rolando Anselmi, Rome, Italy, 2022; Small Fixations, Fondazione ICA Milano, Milan, Italy, 2022; Ecosystems of Relations, Super Dakota, Brussels, Belgium, 2022; Particularities, Museum X, Beijing, China 2021; Halcyon and On and On, Franz Kaka Gallery, Toronto, Canada, 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; Last Night I Wore a Costume, LX Gallery, New York, USA, 2019.
Selected Press
2025
designmilk, Jennifer J. Lee’s New Paintings on Burlap Are Unbelievable
Colossal, Loosely Woven Burlap Mimics Digital Pixels in Jennifer J. Lee’s Paintings
The New York Times Style Magazine, The Art World’s Next Big Thing: Tiny Paintings
Galerie, Next Big Thing: Jennifer J. Lee
2023
Two Coats of Paint, Jennifer J. Lee’s Ghostly Familiarity
2022
Artsy, The Best Booths at New York Art Week 2022
2020
E-flux, Jennifer J. Lee’s “Wallflowers”
2019
The New Yorker, Jennifer J. Lee / Joy Curtis
ARTnews, Jennifer J. Lee