Recurring themes in the work of Adam Lee are the act of pilgrimage, shelter and an itinerant, nomadic sense of home. Transmitted through a community of hermits, shawl-shod women and regalia-laden gentlefolk traversing deserts, forests and valleys or reposing in tabernacles or dreamed abodes, Lee’s practice ties together narratives of memory, imagination and transcendence. Through his works on linen and paper, Lee builds worlds where allegory and atmosphere coalesce to suggest a highly personal outlook informed by collective folklore and legend. These interior histories find their physical manifestation in Lee’s varied but self-contained technique, which is characterised by mercurial landscapes and a contemporary tenebrism. His oils on linen are a resonant amalgam of sanded back layers of pigment, highly saturated sfumato and a sensitively deployed portraiture, with his watercolour ink works evincing a command of shaping ethereal blooms into impressions of externalised thoughts, sensations and calls to a higher being.


Show Notes:

• Processing his experience from the 2017 residency at Glasshouse (in the South of France) and the exhibition "Monolith" that followed.
• Balancing intuition in creativity with years of academic research.
• Unbiased honesty in the work of children.
• The positive and negatives aspects of the inundation of information as a contemporary artist.
• How his thought process and work is changing
• Taking a more specific and personal approach to work.
• Using art to process and understand life's difficult experiences.
• The unavoidable implications of the influence of commerce on art.

www.adamlee.com.au

Posted 02.20.2020