VALS Jennie Jieun Lee

Pratt Fine Arts Visiting Artist Lecture Series.

For over a decade, Jennie Jieun Lee has challenged conventions of ceramic sculpture, embracing the inherent vulnerability of a medium that has long been tamed by its practitioners. Across busts, vessels, and painting, Lee’s works accumulate indices both deliberate and accidental, grafts that both decorate and distort. Firing works in various states of uprightness and collapse, Lee also imparts ceramic’s requisite hollowness in another reflexive maneuver. References to gestural painting abound in Lee’s work: the artist covers her busts and vessels in liberal pours of glaze, in addition to working in two dimensions. Transferring the immediacy and authenticity conferred upon gestural painting to sculpture, Lee disrupts a medium typically associated with the domestic. 

Jennie Jieun Lee (b. Seoul, 1973) lives and works in Sullivan County, New York. Recent solo exhibitions include AF Projects, Los Angeles (2020); Halsey McKay Gallery, East Hampton (2020, 2018); and Martos Gallery, New York (2019, 2015). She is the recipient of several grants including Art Matters (2019), The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2017), and the Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant (2016). She has a forthcoming solo exhibition with Cooper Cole, Toronto.

Recorded November 15, 2021