Austin Lee, Like It Is (Installation View), via Jeffrey Deitch
For over a decade, Austin Lee has explored the emotional potential of software-influenced art. Combining traditional techniques with digital tools to create colorful, energetic compositions in painting, sculpture and animation, the artist’s use of software in conjunction with his physical materials render works that split the difference between digital and physical spaces. For his most recent show, on view now at Jeffrey Deitch in New York, the artist explores emotion and physicality once again through a series of hazy, brightly colored paintings that continue their navigation through notions of tactility and experience.
Austin Lee, Like It Is (Installation View), via Jeffrey Deitch
Permeating Lee’s work is a fascination with feelings and the human psychological experience. Many of the paintings reference the famous Rorschach test, a diagnostic psychological test that uses a subject’s perception of inkblots to analyze their personality characteristics and emotional functioning. Some of Lee’s images pull directly from the test’s familiar symmetry, while others make a quieter reference. Each work renounces predetermined narratives and instead invites viewers to connect through their thoughts and emotions. Appreciating the variety of ways in which digital images can enter the physical world, Lee expands technology’s implications and possibilities in art-making. He uses 3-D modeling, motion-capture and virtual reality to translate nuanced observations and atmospheres into airbrushed paintings. Whether referencing pop culture icons or creating his own characters entirely, Lee’s paintings build on recognizable cultural motifs and art historical imagery, spanning from historical photos and tarot cards to Vermeer paintings.
Austin Lee, Like It Is (Installation View), via Jeffrey Deitch
Austin Lee, Like It Is (Installation View), via Jeffrey Deitch
The lumpy, twisting forms in Lee’s work makes much of the body as something to be considered in spaces beyond the corporeal, masses of digital material that seem to push beyond the notion of the human. In one work, a group of figures beam for an imagined camera, surrounded by a halo of light and swathed in a deep blue glow that gives their smiling visages an eerie sensation. In one sculpture, a looping, slender seraphim descends from the heavens, suspended over the gallery with an equally pleasant smile on its face. Elsewhere, Lee’s smiling figures pose in moments of seeming boredom, avatars of space where nothing seems to really happen. In others, child-like creatures contend for the viewer’s attention. Throughout, there’s a sense of the world as something held just beyond the painting, these images standing in for their referent in subtle, surreal ways.
The artist’s work is on view through April 23rd.
– D. Creahan
Read more:
Austin Lee: Like It Is [Exhibition Site]
