Exhibitions

In Every Dream Home

August 30 - October 5, 2024

Jim Lee

Press Release

   |   

Download Press Release [PDF]

Press Release

Opening reception Thursday, September 5, 6–8pm

Nicelle Beauchene Gallery is pleased to present In Every Dream Home, Jim Lee’s sixth solo exhibition with the gallery.

In Every Dream Home draws its title referentially from the 1973 song written by Bryan Ferry (of Roxy Music fame)—a psychedelic love song to an inflatable doll. Throughout Lee’s body of work homage and humor are predicated by the alchemic process of mixing high and low brow influences—a core tenet of the artist’s practice. Lee challenges the traditional framework of painting by employing his canvases as subjects of investigation that record an ongoing exchange between the refined and common, even crude, elements incorporated.

With a signature mélange of paints applied atop canvases—some seamed, stapled, or entirely unstretched—the methods Lee utilizes suggest the immediate and spontaneous nature of his process. Oscillating between the construction and sabotage of his own work, Lee challenges notions of painting as object and painting as experimentation. A promiscuous reverence for found and foraged materials gives Lee’s work a recognizable playfulness resolved against any sanctity that might be associated with the lineage of artists that have come before him. Yet a confluence of motifs borrowed from several post-war abstract movements demonstrates an admiration, and sometimes irreverence, for the lexicon of art history. Alongside painting and sculpture, In Every Dream Home debuts a video work of anonymous models wearing heels in a 1974 Shasta camper. Constructed from Lee’s own shoes and used wooden stretcher bars, the six-inch heels nod to Lee’s fascination with the deconstruction of traditional parameters of painting and mechanisms of support revealed throughout his practice.

Lee toys with materiality and space, physicality and texture, color and form that reads as part painting, part sculpture. His work gives a viewer the opportunity to engage with painting from all angles and perspectives—asking what can be communicated with minimal visual information without giving a definitive answer in return.

Jim Lee (b. 1970, Berrien Springs, MI) received his MFA from the University of Delaware in 1996. He has shown internationally at Galerie Xippas, Paris; Galerie Vidal Cuglietta, Brussels; Motus Fort, Tokyo; FDC Satellite, Brussels and Galerie Markus Winter, Berlin. Additionally he has been included in exhibitions at the Lamar Dodd School of Art at University of Georgia, Athens, GA; the Center for the Arts Gallery, Towson, MD; Ratio 3, San Francisco; LAND, Los Angeles; Islip Art Museum, NY; Galerie Ruth Leuchter, Dusseldorf; Galerie Lelong, New York; Andrae Kaufmann Gallery, Berlin; IMOCA, Indianapolis; White Flag Projects, St. Louis; Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Atlanta; Larry Becker Contemporary Art, Philadelphia and the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, NY. Lee lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.