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Margaret Lee

Bad, Immediately

January 7 – February 13, 2021

Install view of rope sculpture and abstract paintings

Installation view, 2021

Gallery view showing abstract paintings and rope sculpture

Installation View, 2021

Gallery view of abstract paintings and rope sculpture

Installation view, 2021

Gallery view of paintings and sculptures

Installation view, 2021

Gallery view of paintings and rope sculpture

Installation view, 2021

Gallery view of several abstract paintings

Installation view, 2021

Gallery view of abstract paintings

Installation view, 2021

Gallery view of two abstract paintings

Installation view, 2021

Gallery view of painting and rope sculpture

Installation view, 2021

Gallery view of paintings and neon light

Installation view, 2021

Oil painting with newspaper

B.I., 05, 2020

Oil Paint, Newspaper on Linen

50 x 68 in

Abstract painting, using black, gray, purple and white

B.I., 14, 2020
Oil Paint, Newspaper on Linen
50 x 68 in
 

Abstract painting featuring purple house like structure

B.I., 16, 2020

Oil Paint, Newspaper on Linen

50 x 68 in

Abstract painting featuring house like structure

B.I., 13, 2020

Oil Paint, Newspaper on Linen

50 x 68 in

Abstract painting, white, black and purple colors.

B.I., 18, 2020

Oil Paint, Newspaper on Linen

50 x 68 in

Painting of black ladder over white background

B.I., 04, 2020

Oil Paint, Newspaper on Linen

50 x 68 in

Abstract painting featuring circular black lines

B.I., 03, 2020

Oil Paint, Newspaper on Linen

50 x 68 in

Large abstract oil painting, black lines over white background

B.I., 09, 2020

Oil Paint, Newspaper on Linen

50 x 68 in

Black abstract oil painting

B.I., 10, 2020

Oil Paint, Newspaper on Linen

50 x 68 in

Close up of sculpture featuring rope, nails and scale

Ropes, Nails, Scales (In relation), 2021

Rope, Stainless Steel Nails, Scales

Dimensions Variable

Close up of sculpture featuring rope, nails, and scale

Ropes, Nails, Scales (In relation), 2021

Rope, Stainless Steel Nails, Scales

Dimensions Variable

Black abstract painting

Personalized Space, 05, 2019

Canvas, Newspaper, Oil Paint, Oil Pastel, Rope

Framed: 41.75 x 31.75 inches

Rose shaped neon sign

Roses (pre and post), 2019
Neon
84 x 24 inches
 

Black abstract painting with rope around frame

Personalized Space, 04, 2019

Canvas, Newspaper, Oil Paint, Oil Pastel, Rope

Framed: 41.75 x 31.75 inches

Abstract black painting with rope attached

Personalized Space, 06, 2019

Canvas, Newspaper, Oil Paint, Oil Pastel, Rope

Framed: 42 x 34.5 inches

 

Suspense arouses expectations but what good are expectations if they inevitability end in disappointment. Been thinking about ways up, out and around but I keep coming back to accepting that bad immediately is just fine.                                                                            - ML, 2021 NYC

 

Bisecting the gallery in Margaret Lee’s exhibition Bad, Immediately is a new sculptural installation comprised of rope and nails. The suspended rope, which is tangled midway between ground and ceiling, snakes along the gallery’s floor, and ends in a knot. A sense of heaviness is suggested by the placement of coils on scales. Nails tenuously hold the arrangement together. The cord’s fraying fabric anticipates strain.

 

Ropes have been making the rounds in Lee’s work. In the artist’s previous exhibition at Jack Hanley Gallery, It’s not that I’m not taking (this) seriously (2016), a large, freestanding sculpture featured a rope slung over a wall. A knotted loop on the back of this was attached to a single screw, while twelve plaster bananas hung on the front. Ropes, for Lee, express the ambiguous potential of infrastructure. Such objects can carry a gallows humor, or invoke a feeling of being twisted. Concurrently, however, ropes can hold things and spaces together, or foreground the possibility of connection. Their value is defined by their use. They are relational objects.

 

A meditation on infrastructure likewise informs the eight new abstract paintings featured in the exhibition. These have been rendered in an understated palette of white, black and magenta. Torn sections of newspaper are embedded into the ground of the canvases, some more legible than others.

 

Care has been given to the preparation of each canvas, giving the gesso a compositional presence. The application of paint in lines, patches and rectangles bring to mind the incidental markings that are often visible on the walls of urban buildings and passageways. The presence of grids and simple color gradients further recalls the built environment. In this series, the painting’s ground can be interpreted as a metaphor for the base—the fabric of material relations upon which economic value is created. In their spare, non-representational poetics, the paintings weigh the possibility of what the sociologist Herbert Marcuse described as a “double reality,” where refusal is possible, established language and images fail, and form holds the contradictions that point toward psychological or social transformation. By calling the eye toward the canvas, the artworks consider the competing pressures that are contained in an object’s surface.

 

Through these sculptural and painterly gestures, Bad, Immediately reflects on the frustrations of moving up and putting out. Yet while grounded in a degree of suspicion toward the present, the exhibition, as its title subtly intimates, seeks to move past the here and now. Letting go of current expectations can, in certain instances, lead to the understanding that things can change. Driven by this observation, the exhibition searches for an artistic language that signals beyond what is immediately given, and towards a vision of a world that is rebuilt from bottom to top.

 

Margaret Lee has organized and exhibited work at numerous venues domestically and internationally. A selection of the artist’s recent solo and group exhibitions includes: (2020) For a Dreamer of Houses, Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX (2016) Duddell’s x DMA: Concentrations HK: Margaret Lee, Duddell’s, Hong Kong, China (2016) de, da, do…da, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. Public collections include: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Dallas Museum of Art, Dikeou Collection, Rubell Family Collection, and the Astrup Fearnley Museet. In 2009, Lee founded the artist-run space 179 Canal and is the co-founder of the gallery 47 Canal.

 

For more information please contact Silke Lindner-Sutti at silke@jackhanley.com