JENNIE JIEUN LEE
Born 1973, Seoul, South Korea.
Lives and works in Sullivan County, NY.
Jennie Jieun Lee creates a wide variety of ceramic sculptures, ranging from busts and hand-built slabs, to wheel-thrown vessels and organic, morphing masks. Her bold use of color and mark-making allude to histories of abstract painting, full of expressive gesture and emotive hints at representational forms.
Lee’s sculptures are multi-varied, both in form and appearance. Colors of all kinds can find their way into a single piece; natural pastels abut metallic pigments, which flow across assorted glazes and textures. Pieces may feature a number of sculptural methods, even incorporating more transformational elements, like fissures and physical breaks. Inspirations for color combinations come from artists like Marlene Dumas and Wassily Kandinsky, as well as more cinematic influences, like the glowing city scenes of Martin Scorsese.
Lee and her family immigrated to New York in the late ‘70s, and much of her work makes reference to the artist’s own personal history as a Korean-American growing up and evolving in the United States. Her masks, for instance, full of winks and squashed smiles, incorporate the artist’s own struggles with agoraphobia, and the “strange faces we need to present in life as adults.”
Jennie Jieun Lee (b. Seoul, Korea) lives and works in Sullivan County, New York. Recent solo exhibitions include AF Projects, Los Angeles (2020); Halsey McKay Gallery, East Hampton (2020, 2018); and Martos Gallery, New York (2019, 2015). She is the recipient of several grants including Art Matters (2019), The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2017), and the Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant (2016). She has a forthcoming solo exhibition with Cooper Cole, Toronto.