This exhibition is a mini-retrospective of the work of the American sculptor Catherine Lee. It focuses on the artist’s work from the past decade and explores the point at which her work began to deploy pure three-dimensional space through the powerful use of material, colour and form.
Born in Texas in 1950, Lee’s works are a hybrid of painting, sculpture and installation, in which she juxtaposes the simplicity of a repeated form with a richness of materials, such as wax, bronze, glass and fibreglass. She first exhibited in New York at P.S.1 in 1980, and since then has participated in numerous exhibitions internationally. Her exhibition, The Alphabet Series, was shown in Texas, Washington, Connecticut and Pennsylvania. More recently, her work has been seen in Barcelona, Salzburg, Milan and Copenhagen. Her work is included in the collections of SFMOMA; MOMA, New York; the Tate Collection, London and the Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh.
The works in this exhibition range from exquisite polychromatic small wall-mounted pieces such as Other Voices, 1993, to her large-scale sculptures, Hebrides, 2003, which will be installed in the courtyard of IMMA. Materials are explored through the painterly use of hand-patinated bronzes as in the imposing, Sybilla, 2000, or through the elegant use of raku-fired ceramic in the Cubic series. Although Lee’s work has always been purely abstract in form, she states that things, “like the stone circles in Ireland, African masks, and American-Indian pictographs are all to varying degrees abstract to us, simply because we don’t fully know their original significance; and yet, they are potent as art objects”.
The exhibition is curated by Enrique Juncosa, Director, IMMA. This is a touring exhibition and will travel to Musée d’Art Moderne, Saint Etienne, France.
A catalogue, with essays by Enrique Juncosa and Caoimhin Mac Giolla Leith, curator and critic, accompanies the exhibition (price €42.00).
Please download the following link to read the essay by Caoimhin Mac Giolla Leith:
Assortments: The Art of Catherine Lee by Caoimhin Mac Giolla Leith (Word doc 2005 – 32.5KB)
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