SARAH LEE
The Blue Hour
July 1 – August 1, 2021
ATM Gallery NYC is pleased to announce The Blue Hour, the first New York solo exhibition by Sarah Lee, featuring seven new paintings and one new work on paper. Lee’s work brings the centuries-long genre of landscape painting into the twenty-first century. Landscape was once a favorite typology among fine artists, but it waned in the twentieth century’s iconic struggles between figuration and abstraction and faded even further in the recent resurgence of figurative painting, which has focused chiefly on depicting humans.
Lee’s landscapes are surreal, cartoonish, dreamlike—the sort one imagines as backdrops for fairytales, full of secrets and possible danger. A peculiar and eerie vacancy is palpable. It is almost as if Lee had first painted figures or objects into the landscape but then erased them to leave a noticeable void or is depicting an empty theater stage in the middle of a fantastic or surreal play.
The exhibition's title refers to the fabled blue hour that marks a particular interval during twilight, both in the morning and the evening, characterized by an intense and dark blue color of the sky. The blue hour is often associated with a period of calm, secrecy, a standstill, and a division between day and night. It has taken on a mythical status, and has this been the subject of many artworks and works of poetry, especially during the era of Romanticism.
Moon and a Star (2021, oil on canvas, 54 × 48 inches) is a night forest scene illuminated by a full, bright moon. We see two large trees in the foreground, both with almost human-like appearances. The ground is covered in snow. Two elements stand out: a mysterious shadow behind one of the trees and an obscure star hanging from the branch of another, reminiscent of a Christmas decoration. The painting invites us to speculate on what just took place here or might happen shortly.
As Long as There Is Light (2021, oil on canvas, 28 × 25 inches) portrays another night illuminated by a full moon. We see a boat floating on calm water—a pond, or perhaps the bay of an ocean. Mysterious lights are visible under the water, maybe the glowing eyes of fishes or reptiles. The boat is secured in place by large arms of seaweed that hold it tight and steady. No soul is in sight.
Perhaps a little less ambiguous is Cat in the Fog (2021, oil on canvas, 55 × 50 inches), which departs from the color palette of the other works in the show, dominated as they are by blues, grays, and dark greens. Here, in a heavy fog, different greens and yellows give way to gray and white toward the background. In the foreground is another pond, this one covered by water lilies. The inexplicable underwater lights from As Long as There Is Light appear again, and in the distance is a group of skinny trees. In the center of the panting, barely noticeable, a cat stares directly at us with eyes that look just like the strange underwater lights.
Lee invites us into an alternative universe somewhere between dusk and dawn that is full of mystery, fore fronting beauty, and melancholia via landscapes that are vacant, dreamlike, unnaturalistic, surreal, and puzzling.
Sarah Lee (b. 1988, Seoul) lives and works in New York. In 2017 she received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she also received her BFA in 2011. Lee also studied painting at Seoul National University in 2014. Her work has been featured in numerous galleries and art institutions, including Galerie Hussenot, Paris (2021), Artnutri Gallery, Taipei (2020), One Eyed Studios, Queens (2019), The Mission Project, Chicago (2017), Julius Caesar Gallery, Chicago (2017), and Gallery Won, Seoul (2014), among others.