Australian artist Adam Lee creates beautiful and evocative paintings that reference spiritual narratives surrounding the temporality of life.
Lee's paintings are largely composed of thin washes of paint, built up to create areas of soft, dream-like imagery that fight against their concrete finished detailing. He increases the intensity of his colours by carefully selecting their complementaries, such as a vibrant yellow and deep navy, which radiate off each other. The accompanying text of Lee's exhibition, This Earthen Tent, explains that, "the works are often accompanied by a foreboding sense of regeneration, which has less to do with any sort of apocalyptic revelation, but rather what the artist views as a renewal, or an elevation of the everyday and the ordinary toward the suggestion of an emergence of a new world." The ghostly and peculiar figures suggest a contemplation on longing, loneliness, and faith. A viewer meditating upon Lee's paintings experience a deeper mediation on life, death, and spirituality itself.
Adam Lee's paintings have a loving quality to their layers, colours, and complicated imagery, with his labour adding to their reflective nature. They have both a lightness and darkness of pigment and emotion bring together the mortal and immortal worlds in an imaginative and thoughtful way.
