Kyung-Lim Lee
NADA New York
May 7, 2025 - May 11, 2025
Josh Pazda Hiram Butler is pleased to feature a solo presentation of drawings by Kyung-Lim Lee at the TD Bank Curated Spotlight section of NADA New York 2025, organized by Owen Duffy, Nancy C. Allen Curator and Director of Exhibitions at Asia Society Texas. Reflecting her long-standing interest in the ellipse as a generative form, Lee’s latest drawings explore the meditative power of geometric abstraction to manifest mysterious and inviting evocations of the four seasons. Utilizing ellipse-shaped canvases as an alternative to the perceived confines of a rectangular support, Lee’s drawings become portals to a cosmic refuge where time thickens, space expands, and the bright light of reality begins to soften and glow.
Lee’s artistic practice is rooted in a meditative engagement with linguistic concepts, often derived from Chinese characters. Words become touchstones for the creation of abstract visual forms, which can take nuanced and dynamic appearances that range in tone, color, shape, and rhythm. Lee’s latest drawings from her Penumbra series reward close observation as pan pastel and color pencil are subtly deployed to evoke the elusive nature of light and time. At moments reminiscent of Mark Rothko or Kazimir Malevich, the interaction of shape and color within Lee’s drawings imbues her subject with an expressive and emotive force that suggests the spiritual and transcendent.
The centerpiece of Lee’s presentation at NADA is the monumentally scaled multi-panel construction, Ellipses (2009), a 78-panel grisaille polyptych comprised of repeated geometric shapes rendered with dry pigment and India ink on clay board. The material heft of this work emphasizes drawing-as-object, physically manifesting forms of step pyramids that are deeply rooted in the artist’s visual lexicon. Through repetition, layering, and patterning of squares and ellipses, Lee creates a vibrant and dynamic field that pulses with the entrancing interplay between unity and division, light and dark, absence and presence. By carefully rendering the ellipse with unwavering accuracy, Lee transforms this shape into a conduit for contemplating the perceptual mysteries of life.
Kyung-Lim Lee (b. 1957, Seoul, Korea) lives and works in Oxford, MD and Flagstaff, AZ. Lee has had solo exhibitions at Josh Pazda Hiram Butler, Houston; Häusler Contemporary, Zürich; The Temple Hotel, Beijing; Academy Art Museum, Easton, MD; Diözesanmuseum, Freising, among others. Group exhibitions include Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Scottsdale; Haus der Kunst, München; The Park Avenue Armory, New York; The Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York; and the Asian American Arts Centre, New York, among others. Lee’s work has been collected by the Academy Art Museum, Easton, MD; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the University of Texas at Austin, among others.