Austin Lee, Good Weather (2023), via Pace Prints
This month in New York, artist Austin Lee presents a selection of prints in collaboration with the Pace Prints studio. Titled “Good Impressions,†the show marks a continuation of Lee’s expressive and multi-faceted modes of image generation.Â
As in his painting practice, Lee makes prints with a hybrid digital and analog philosophy. Whether it is creating plates from digital drawings, or manually airbrushing large-scale works inspired by digital color and form, his mode of making evolves to recontextualize conventional methods. The exhibition will present unique prints and multiples made using a broad spectrum of digital and traditional techniques, in scales ranging from the intimate to the monumental. His works bear an intriguing mix of textures, incorporating movements of the hand and a color palette that seems to reflect the use of an air-brush, yet the form and movement of his images equally belie a subtle digital edge; colors and lines that seem enhanced or manipulated through the computer.
Austin Lee, On the Way (2023), via Pace Prints
With On the Way, a new sculptural multiple in an edition of 25, Lee also continues work in three-dimensional objects, this one created in virtual reality for the painting of the same name. The sculpture depicts the emotional crisis of the mundane on a family drive. The artist seeks to make visible what was once hidden in the original painting and allow the viewer to experience the work from all sides and angles. We see not just what’s in the painting but the full digital space within which the painting was created. Cast in bronze and painted in likeness to the artist’s signature airbrush finish, the sculpture imparts a deceiving weightlessness.
Austin Lee, Window (2023), via Pace Prints
In this exhibition, Lee also returns to portraiture from life, a practice which he first explored during his studies at Yale. These works started as a playful take on Leonardo da Vinci’s sfumato technique and are painted directly from live sitters, hoping to catch a hint or impression of them. The nature of sitting for a portrait allows for an intimate moment of direct human connection that the artist finds especially important today and allows a brief moment of access into another person’s inner world.
The show is on view through June 16th.
– C. Rhinehart
Read more:
Austin Lee at Pace Prints [Exhibition Site]
