Woodshedding

Press Release

Nicelle Beauchene Gallery is pleased to announce Woodshedding, an exhibition of new paintings by Jim Lee. This will be the artist’s third solo show in New York and his first solo exhibition with the gallery.

In Woodshedding Lee continues to investigate painting as a three-dimensional object and maintains his ongoing engagement with materiality and space, physicality and texture and color and form. Integrating painting with elements of drawing and sculpture, the works in this exhibition challenge the confines of surface, line, scale and frame to expand earnestly upon a post-minimalist tradition. Melding humor and sincerity with a confluence of art historical references, Lee’s works are expressive and raw and reveal compositions with loose, material play.

Borrowing a musician’s term which suggests ‘going off to practice,’ Woodshedding was conceived and executed while Lee was in the Catskills on an artist residency. Further implying a devotion to getting it right, the title Woodshedding calls attention to the act of production where playful gesture and formal investigation co-mingle. Creating works where chance and spontaneity become a condition of his practice and operate as a medium, Lee’s materials-based approach to abstraction tends towards a vision that is at once personal, introspective and idiosyncratic.

Jim Lee received his MFA from the University of Delaware in 1996. He has had several international solo exhibitions including shows at Motus Fort, Tokyo; FDC Satellite, Brussels; Galerie Markus Winter, Berlin and Freight and Volume, New York. Additionally, he has been included in exhibitions at Daimler Contemporary, Berlin; La Station, Nice, France; IMOCA, Indianapolis; White Flag Projects, St. Louis; Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Atlanta; Allston Skirt Gallery, Boston and the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, NY. Lee lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.