John Lees
Mater, 1979-2012
Oil on Canvas
20 x 20 inches
Signed, titled & dated on verso
JL13916
Via Piave, 1997-2007; 2012
Oil on canvas
23 x 11 in. (58.42 x 27.94 cm)
Signed, titled and dated on verso
JL12383
Bog, 2010-2012
Pencil, Ink, Watercolor on paper
10 1/8 x 25 3/4 in. (25.72 x 65.41 cm)
JL13787
Untitled (Clown), 2009-2012
Pencil, Watercolor and Ink on paper
14 x 7 in. (35.56 x 17.78 cm)
Signed lower left
JL13908
River Landscape, 1990-2012
Oil on Panel
25 1/2 x 44 in. (64.77 x 111.76 cm)
Signed, titled and dated recto
JL13911
Landscape, 1991-1995; 2012
Oil on Canvas
21 3/4 x 34 1/2 in. (55.25 x 87.63 cm)
Signed, titled and dated on verso
JL13922
John Lees
May 16 – June 22, 2013
New York, NY – Betty Cuningham Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings and drawings by John Lees, opening on May 16th. This will be the artist’s third solo show at the gallery, located at 541 W. 25th Street, between 10th and 11th Avenues. The artist will be present for an opening reception on Thursday, May 16th (6 – 8PM); the exhibition will remain on view through Saturday, June 22nd.
Lees characteristically spends years working and reworking his paintings and drawings. The build up and sanding down of paint, tears, patches and even written diary logs of dates are among the physical reminders of the lengthy time spent on each painting. Although the works in this exhibition are recently completed, many were in fact started decades ago.
John Lees paints as if his paintings were recurring dreams. In this exhibition, Lees’ dreams include: simple dreams such as an Umbrian landscape or swaying treetops; childhood dreams of Dilly Dally - an early TV character with whom Lees identified, or of Rte 66 – his family’s escape route to the West Coast; and psychological dreams, particularly one of the lonely clown as painter. More complex memories come into play in his portraits: one of his mother, Mater, started in 1979 and completed in 2012, and another of Lees father, Man in an Armchair – a subject of more than one painting in this show. In two works featuring the Metropolitan Museum Cloisters’ angel, Lees has transformed earlier ‘stream’ paintings into the flowing Romanesque angel. Memory moves to form - the stream - and the form moves to meaning - a Romanesque angel. Throughout, for Lees, the media is as deep as the memories and vice versa.
Lees is the recipient of numerous awards and grants, including the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Hassam, Speicher, Betts, and Symons Purchase Fund Award; the Francis J. Greenburger Award; the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Grant; and the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Grant. His work can be found in a host of public institutions, most notably the Detroit Institute of Art, Detroit, MI; the Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, MA; The Kemper Collection, Kansas City, MO; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; and The New Museum, New York, NY.
John Lees was born in 1943 in Denville, NJ. He received his BFA and MFA from the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, CA. He has been exhibiting in New York since 1977 and has been an instructor at the New York Studio School since 1988. He lives and works in upstate New York.
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In 1906 the critic Philip Hale remarked that he perceived a “fine insanity” in the work of Marsden Hartley, by which the artist took him to mean “a strong insistence upon the personal interpretations of the subjects chosen.” While Marsden might not be the first name to come to mind in viewing John Lees’ fourth solo exhibition at Betty Cuningham, Lees does harness his unequivocal mastery of paint into building images that speak of a similar, profound commitment to inner reflection.
Like the fabled American nineteenth-century artist Albert Pinkham Ryder, John Lees often works on his paintings for years, even decades, overlaying the canvases with what the French call “couches” of pigment (a word relating to “couch” in English—to lay down on). And he modifies, eliminates, paints over, peers at, thinks about, thinks more about, changes again, scrapes, puts aside (facing the wall), looks at yet again, adds more paint to, further edits, revises, and so encrusts the surfaces in a richly heavy and sometimes bumpy or gravelly, sometimes willfully crude, scumbled textures that may glow with colors both luxuriant and subtle from beneath. So these paintings age with him.
John Lees’s hallmark obsession with his interior life is legendary. The twenty-seven works on view at Betty Cuningham Gallery are concrete examples of his introspective style; they are ponderous, blisteringly intense, and hyperspecific. While his obsessiveness may fuel a rich interior life, it has clearly come at a cost. He seems to have little time or energy left over to pursue that elusive possession of the comfortably successful artist: recognition.
In early November, clocks around here seem to slow down as fallen aspen leaves are plastered to the concrete and light snowfall hints at the winter to come. The empty streets do not profess a dearth of cultural offerings, though.
The Ah Haa School for the Arts has several offerings during the next month: most notably, the Telluride Painting School’s The Central Image Still Life, taught by acclaimed artist and professor John Lees over the course of two weeks, from Nov. 9-20.
