The exhibition by Art Projects International showcases the first view of Lee’s paintings which he has been developing over ten years. These acrylic and oil on canvas paintings feature his approach of incising a top layer of paint with line to reveal a bottom layer of ground. Lee’s signature lines travel the canvas edge to edge and are concentrated at intervals to create fields of edgeless forms that are intrinsically complex in their creation, variety, and interconnection. Importantly, these paintings have a parallel history with Lee’s well known ballpoint pen work and share the distinction of tracing their lineage to Lee’s early mature style of the 1980s.
Il Lee is a Korean-born American contemporary artist. He was born in South Korea and has been living in America since the mid-1970s. Il Lee is best known for his ballpoint pen artwork, large-scale abstract imagery on paper and canvas. He also creates artwork in a similar vein utilizing acrylic and oil paint on canvas.
Lee has explored the potential of the ballpoint pen, sometimes altering the pen itself to change the quality of a line and always engaging in a demanding process that allows him to repeatedly defy any limited expectations one might have for the ballpoint pen pigment as medium.
In this Pandemic, Lee has been working on expanding the body of paintings. His process and his commitment bring words to mind that are charged in today’s world: freedom, difficulty, responsibility, restraint, honesty, study, labor. In the end, the future may know Lee as an innovator in drawing and painting who embraced his own time and claimed his own identity.
With an unorthodox media and distinctive style, Lee’s work gained recognition world wide. In his recent acrylic and oil works on canvas, Lee offers a counterpoint to his well-known ballpoint pen work and continues his early investigations of materials and process that began decades ago. Lee’s innovative and historically grounded ballpoint pen works were the subject of a critically-acclaimed mid-career retrospective at the San Jose Museum of Art in 2007.