Number 35 is pleased to present recent paintings by Miyeon Lee. In this body of work, Lee explores not only objects in the space around us, but also objects in space itself.

Miyeon Lee’s paintings recall familiar spaces and forms while never fully revealing the sources of their pictorial idiosyncrasies. In Plywood Sonata 10 (2009), Lee paints plywood – not by simply placing paint on wood, but by painstakingly rendering each knothole and tree ring in paint on canvas which she then splatters with paint to resemble original piece taken from a construction site. In Plywood Sonata 11 (2009), the painted plywood is a rich red hosting only a few paint splatters. In these pieces, the representational aspect takes a backseat to the super-reductive as the elements that compose the paintings break down into compositional parts.

In her latest series, Lee paints meteorites floating in undefined space. M-1 (2009) depicts a stony meteorite sitting dormant on a white canvas, each chrondrite and achrondrite rendered with the tiniest dot or smear of paint. In Journey of Solitude (2009), Lee surrounds the meteorite in velvety black, robbing it of motion and context, landing somewhere between micro and macro. A new way to paint the old abstract, Lee reduces real life down to moments.

Miyeon Lee (b. 1980) was born in JeonJu, South Korea. She received her BFA from School of Visual Arts in 2003. She currently lives and works in New York City.