NEW YORK, NY.- Art Projects International is presenting IL LEE: 4 Paintings, an exhibition featuring large-scale ballpoint works. The 4 Paintings exhibition, based on notes and instructions from our director and founder Jung Lee Sanders, is dedicated to her memory. Through her curation, passion, commitment, and collaboration with others, much of Il Lee’s dynamic progression over the past decades has been visible on the walls of Art Projects International, as well as museums and institutions worldwide.
This current exhibition 4 Paintings gives the viewers an opportunity to see large format ballpoint works of years past, as well as recent works from 2024 (being shown for the first time) that incorporate Il Lee’s signature style and themes — on view are ink works on canvas; “inkless” ballpoint, acrylic and oil works on canvas; and an early never before exhibited large-scale work on paper. Each labor-intensive work is the result of vast movements with similar yet entirely different refrains.
The large ballpoint on canvas BL-060 (2005), 84 x 144 inches, is one of Lee’s iconic signature works. It is dominated by a form hewn from countless ink lines and repetitive gestures. Reviewing the artist’s 2007 mid-career survey at the San Jose Museum of Art, Kenneth Baker in the San Francisco Chronicle mused that the work “looks like a mountain landscape, a subject deeply rooted in Asian arts. But in close view, imagery dissolves and the process comes forward… Consciousness of the working surface — how to divide it, how to apportion the weight of marking — appears uppermost.”
Untitled 978 O (1997-98), 82 x 60 inches, a never before exhibited large-scale work on paper from Lee’s highly prized 978 series, approaches seven feet tall and appears to present black starbursts formed by concentrations of lines against a dark energy map of less dense lines. As Erik Bakke wrote in IL LEE: The 90s, featuring several other 978 works, “They lean away from narrative, and more importantly, carry with them a core aesthetic sensibility, a sense of mystery, through which viewers seem to feel a connection to some fundamental physics of being (whether anthropocentric or post-humanist).”
BL-071 (2006), 75 x 115 inches, is a stellar example of one of Lee’s large-scale ballpoint pen on canvas works. A detail of this work serves as the cover for his 2007 SJMA exhibition catalogue. Again, Lee’s unflagging linework create deceptively simple and enigmatic forms that activate the space of the painting as well as the viewer’s imagination.
Jung Lee Sanders also selected a more recent work — TW-1801 (2018), 80 x 106 inches. It is an “inkless” ballpoint work of acrylic and oil on canvas — the pen is used as a tool to cut lines through one or more layers of paint to reveal other layers beneath. Incorporating subtle color, it is a rare work and reveals the path for further development, as seen in Lee’s never before seen recent works from this year.
Over the past decades, Il Lee’s international presence and his following have and continue to grow.
IL LEE (b. 1952 Seoul, Korea. Lives and works in New York) is internationally celebrated for his pioneering work with ballpoint pen and a storied career spanning nearly five decades. The significance of Lee’s artistic contributions, use of unorthodox media, and singular sensibility have received worldwide recognition.
Born and raised in Seoul, Lee studied painting in the 1960s and 1970s with seminal figures of South Korean contemporary art including those in the vanguard of the abstract monochrome painting (Dansaekhwa) movement. In 1977, armed with a distinct cultural background and artistic training, Lee moved to New York where he developed his signature process and style using ballpoint pen, a medium important to his practice over the decades. 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. His large acrylic and oil on canvas work along with his ballpoint ink works on paper were exhibited in Representation/Abstraction in Korean Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2010, and his innovative and historically grounded ballpoint pen works were the subject of a ground breaking mid- career retrospective at the San Jose Museum of Art in 2007. Work by Il Lee is represented in prominent collections, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), San Jose Museum of Art (SJMA), Palm Springs Art Museum, Vilcek Foundation, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Korea, Leeum Samsung Museum of Art (Seoul), Société Bic (France), Montefiore Fine Art Collection and Bank of America among others.
