Juxtapoz Journal – Preview: Sarah Lee’s “Two Skies” Over NYC

As we maintain wanting into all of the reveals developing this fall, one present we now have our eye on is Sarah Lee’s Two Skies, opening on September seventh at albertz benda in NYC. Her serene and but usually nearly violently quiet work of nature have been seen as nearly mysterious and supernatural, a touch upon the interior psyche of the viewer, the painter, and our relationship with nature. 

Lee’s finely painted, haunting landscapes hail from a European slightly than an East Asian custom. A copy of Millais’s Ophelia 1851 – 52 hangs alongside French illustrations and images of the Northern Lights on the wall of her East Village studio. Uniting these are intense palettes of earthy greens, deep blues, and glowing chartreuse tones that replicate the horror and fantastic thing about the pure world. Timber bend and sway organically and tall grasses shift with the wind. Slightly than portray actuality, she evokes an concept of a panorama.

Lee seduces viewers along with her work, which draw them nearer within the sense of the true Kantian elegant: as one will get nearer, she feels smaller and the portray feels bigger, as if the scene envelops her. This shared expression of human vulnerability displays the present state of society after two years of pandemic lockdown, a united sense of grief, a wellspring of political resistance, and controversial reversals of longstanding legal guidelines that shield ladies and the LGBTQ neighborhood within the US. Lee’s unpopulated forests, of their solitude, symbolize a meditation on silence and retreat. The forest turns into a substitute for the digital bombardment of our day by day lives—from the 24-hour doomsday information cycle to the obsession with social media, which has been discovered to have deleterious results on psychological well being.

Lee works at night time when downtown New York is quiet and exudes a peaceable vitality, though nighttime is at instances related to a foreboding sense of hazard. Her new collection continues her curiosity in nightfall and night scenes that show a unifying coloration vary. She doesn’t sketch, as an alternative making use of the paint straight to canvas in an intuitive course of that begins from summary concept, which is usually not even visible, however extra of a sense. Beginning with the background, she builds up layers of the canvas—grass, timber, a physique of water, numerous particulars—and smudges the paint to create surfaces as slick as Previous Grasp panels: certainly, the warp and weft of the linen canvas is undetectable.

Lee locations an surprising ingredient in every canvas, for instance a creature or a flower, typically barely discernable within the canvas. In Luna Moths, 2023 the artist scatters small glowing moths all through the scene. These elusive creatures solely exist for one week and haven’t any mouths as they solely dwell to breed. These small touches, mixed with a number of gentle sources, lend the scene an uncanny glowing ambiance. On this sense her work could also be understood within the legacy of Surreal artists together with Giorgio di Chirico, Yves Tanguy, and Marion Elizabeth Adnams or transcendental artists together with Agnes Pelton and Lawren Harris. Lee’s work represents an thrilling various to identity-based figuration that has dominated portray observe in earlier years and indicators a shift in direction of a extra mystical method to artmaking.