“Austin Lee: Feels Good”


Austin Lee's exuberant paintings extend Pop Art into the present. As Andy Warhol used photo silkscreens to connect painting with the image-making technologies of the 1960s, Lee fuses digital techniques with traditional painting and sculptural processes to create totally contemporary works of art. Lee "humanizes" the digital sketches into lush paintings and vibrant sculptures. His work becomes a bridge between the digital and the physical.

Earlier generations of artists began their careers sketching on paper. Lee began by using Photoshop and other digital tools to sketch on his computer. His work combines the latest image making technologies with traditional artistic processes. He uses the airbrush and the paintbrush to create luminous paintings that evoke both the light of a computer screen and the bold coloration of color field painting.

In addition to digital drawing techniques, Lee uses 3-D modeling software to manipulate perspective in both his paintings and sculptures, creating forms that are not found in nature. He is one of the rare artists who has invented his own artistic vocabulary. Both his paintings and his sculptures are instantly identifiable as works by Austin Lee. With his original fusion of techniques, Lee creates iconic images that embody a contemporary vision.

In addition to his paintings of the invented images that emerge from his drawings, Lee will also be showing a group of new portraits that he paints from life. He has been painting visitors to his studio with airbrush during the past several years, resulting in an accumulation of faces. He describes them as being more about capturing a feeling than a likeness. "I work on them until they feel like someone is there."

Austin Lee received his MFA from Yale in 2013. During the past two years, he has presented solo exhibitions at Peres Projects in Berlin, Bank Gallery in Shanghai, and Kaikai Kiki in Tokyo. His work was included in Punch, curated by Nina Chanel Abney at Jeffrey Deitch in the fall of 2018.

INFO
Tuesday May 7 2019 - Saturday May 18 2019
Venue name: Jeffery Deitch
Address: 18 Wooster St
New York
Cross street: between Canal and Grand Sts
Opening hours: Tue-Sat 10am–6pm
Transport: Subway: A,C, E to Canal Street

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