AUSTIN LEE
Nothing Personal
October 24 - December 5, 2015
Postmasters is pleased to announce our second solo exhibition with Austin Lee.
Paintings, wall paintings and sculptures will be on view in both of our gallery spaces.
"Everything should be exploration.
I keep exploring until there is calmness where nothing asks to be changed.
I don't think of my work as being understandable. There really isn't an answer or end. My hope is
that anyone can understand it as well as they understand a tree."
-Austin Lee
Austin Lee's generation can be called "digital natives," - artists for whom that realm is natural, organic and matter of fact.
He is a painter who effortlessly delivers pixel to paint transformation. Lee's paintings are familiar, yet strange, otherworldly,
yet grounded in sometimes tragicomical earthly realities. While they are figurative, there is a level of abstraction that takes
the simplest and most recognizable of forms and disassociates them from representation.
Lee often starts by making digital sketches on an iPad. He then loosely translates the compositions onto canvas using airbrush
and fluorescent paint in response to the garishness and luminosity of the screen. By remaking the virtual into physical, the
immersive textured surface and color of the paintings slow down the viewer's perception of the more immediate screen images.
Often based on real people, the figures depicted could be described as cartoons with a soul where a few quick gestures vividly
convey the emotions of his subjects.
Lee's works in "Nothing Personal" range in their delivery of spatial progression from flat to perspectival to dimensional
illusion, culminating in physical figurative sculpture (3D printed scans that are then textured and painted).
"With economy of means, Lee serves up prodigious psychological turmoil, his faces registering many varieties of pleasure and fright.
They're James Ensor's masks or Peter Saul's monsters updated for an age in which identities no longer hold their shape for long."
- Andrew Russeth,
Gallerist/New York Observer
"While Hockney presented works on iPad that look like someone trying to make 'proper' paintings that transcend the limits of
digital painting tools, Lee's art revels in those supposed limitations. While Hockney's paintings look like the carefully
worked products of an old man who has stumbled across the joys of the digital but whose thinking is rooted in the analogue world,
Lee's work transfers a digital aesthetic onto canvases."
- Niru Ratnam,
The Spectator, London
Austin Lee (b.1983) lives and works in New York. He received an MFA in Painting from Yale School of Art and a BFA from Tyler School of Art.
His most recent solo exhibitions include Carl Kostyal in London and Stockholm and Kaleidoscope in Milan. His work has been written about in
Artnews, New York Magazine, Leap, Time Out New York and London, The NY Observer, Hyperallergic, Black Book, Kaleidoscope Magazine,
The Spectator, and Rhizome.
In September, a book of Austin Lee's drawings has been published by SPHERES. It comes with a free augumented reality app that animates
the images. The book is available at the gallery or via www.spheres-publication.ch
Austin Lee
Nothing Personal
2015
Installation View
Austin Lee
Nothing Personal
2015
Installation View
Austin Lee
Nothing Personal
2015
Installation View
Austin Lee
Nothing Personal
2015
Installation View: Eye 2 Eye
Austin Lee
Nothing Personal
2015
Installation View: Shady
Austin Lee
Nothing Personal
2015
Installation View: New Shoes
Austin Lee
Nothing Personal
2015
Installation View: Soybird
Austin Lee
Nothing Personal
2015
Installation View: Private Moment
Austin Lee
Me and My Dad
2015
flashe acrylic on canvas
72 x 92 inches
Austin Lee
Big Head
2015
styrofoam, plaster, acrylic
70 x 36 inches
Austin Lee
Soybird
2015
flashe acrylic on canvas
96 x 65 inches
Austin Lee
Joy
2015
flashe acrylic on canvas
72 x 36 inches
Austin Lee
Looks
2015
flashe acrylic on canvas
72 x 92 inches
Austin Lee
Smother
2015
flashe acrylic on canvas
94 x 53 inches
Austin Lee
Eye 2 Eye
2015
flashe acrylic on canvas
80 x 96 inches
Austin Lee
New Shoes
2015
flashe acrylic on canvas
60 x 60 inches
Austin Lee
Shady
2015
flashe acrylic on canvas
84 x 60 inches
Austin Lee
Wavy
2015
flashe acrylic on canvas
96 x 72 inches
Austin Lee
Downer
2015
flashe acrylic on canvas
42 x 31 inches
Austin Lee
Private Moment
2015
flashe acrylic on canvas
36 x 60 inches
Austin Lee
Horse Fantasy (Diptych)
2015
flashe acrylic on canvas
36 x 60 inches each panel
Austin Lee
Kiss
2015
flashe acrylic on canvas
12 x 8 x 2 inches
Austin Lee
New Shoes
2015
Animated GIF
Austin Lee
Mom And Dad
2015
3D Printed ABS Plastic, Plaster, Acrylic Paint
Mom: 10 x 10 x 9 inches
Dad: 8 x 10 x 9 inches