Please Be Clean When You Do It

Press Release

Nicelle Beauchene Gallery is pleased to announce the fourth New York solo exhibition by Jim Lee, Please Be Clean When You Do It. This will be Lee’s second solo show with the gallery.

Please Be Clean When You Do It, Lee continues to recast components of painting through a variety of experiments —cutting, dismantling, slicing, sculpting— to create canvases bent on testing
both surface and structure. The physicality of his process can be seen through the use of foraged stretcher bars, haphazardly stapled seams and heavily worked canvases. Through each painting’s evolution, material hierarchies become complicated as Lee oscillates between construction and subsequent sabotage in his practice. Confronting the binaries of image and object, surface and interior and the visual and physical, Lee’s work resides somewhere between drawing, painting and sculpture.

Lee’s work continually draws from the lexicon of art history, yet without overt reference to any one specific source. Engaging in mainly post-war influences, Lee’s constructions are gritty and
raw, yet earnestly engage in and challenge formal investigations of surface, line, scale and frame. In order to experience these works in full, you are compelled to look at it from all angles and to
consider it from all perspectives.

Incorporated in the exhibition is a homemade diddley bow, which extends from the floor to the gallery’s 16- foot ceilings. Lee invites the viewer to participate by playing the instrument, and asks (in reference to the show’s title) that you Please Be Clean When You Do It. The text, borrowed from a sign posted in a shared lavatory, encourages viewer participation to inform the context of the exhibition, rather than to turn the experience into a pissing contest between participants.

Jim Lee received his MFA from the University of Delaware in 1996. He has had several international solo exhibitions including shows at Galerie VidalCuglietta, Brussels; Motus Fort, Tokyo; FDC Satellite, Brussels; Galerie Markus Winter, Berlin and Freight and Volume, New York. Additionally he has been included in exhibitions at Galerie Lelong, New York; Andrae Kaufmann Gallery, Berlin; 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.