Jaehyo Lee “Return to Nature”

Exhibition Summary:
Madison Gallery presents, Return to Nature, new works by South Korean artist, Jaehyo Lee.

Exhibition Details:
Inspired by a recent trip to Brazil, these works are reflections of the artist’s continued quest for spiritual and personal healing. These new paintings create a timeline of Leestemaker’s voyage – viewers are guided through both the physical places and emotional experiences that characterized the profoundly personally and transitional nature of the artist’s journey. In doing such, the viewer is witness to a change within Leestemaker’s work, one that shifts him from the ambiguous landscape to a canvas of enlightenment and painterly nirvana.

Artist Information:
Since graduating in 1992 with a BFA from the Hong-Ik University Jaehyo Lee (1965) has gained acclaim both in his native Korea and internationally for his distinct yet intimately crafted oeuvre. Combining distinct traces of Land Art, Arte Povera and Minimalism Lee´s works cast a questioning eye over the roots of form, its function and its role within the natural world. Lee´s works willfully play with the oft-contested boundaries between modern art and design, referencing the idealist´s cubes, cylinders and cones as perversions of the chaise longue, the coffee table, the lampshade, and even the humble doughnut. Revealing a subtly humorous and unsentimental attitude to nature, what unites these works is a belief that the beauty of art is a product of the labour from whence it comes, whether this be the meticulous carving of larch trunks into the form of a perfect sphere or, equally, the precise bending and sanding of thousands of nails hammered one after another into a hunk of cut lumber. Amongst many other distinctions Jaehyo was in 1998 Grand Prize Winner at the Osaka Triennial and in 2002 recipient of the prestigious Irish Sculpture in Woodland commission. His works are held in public and private collections across Europe, Asia and North America.