‘Deadly Friends’ Patrick Lee Gallery Exhibit Invite, New York, 2012
‘Deadly Friends’ Patrick Lee Exhibition card. Measures 6 x 8.25 inches. Very heavy stock paper. Ameringer McEnery Yohe Gallery, New York, April 25 – May 25, 2012 . See photo for details.
Asking USD$15.
Patrick Philip Lee (b. 1969 in Butte, Montana) attended the Minneapolis College of Art & Design from 1988 to 1989.
He has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Huntington Museum of Art, Hungtington, WV; Western Project, Los Angeles, CA; and Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe, New York, NY.
Lee’s work has been included in group exhibitions at numerous international institutions including the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX; The Community Centre, Paris, France; The Drawing Center, New York, NY; Huntington Museum of Art, Huntington, WV; Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN; Oakland University Art Gallery, Rochester, MI; Pizzuti Collection, Columbus, OH; Studio Cannaregio, Venice, Italy; Tang Teaching Museum, Saratoga Springs, NY; Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts, Grand Rapids, MI; and Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC.
His work may be found in the permanent collections of the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; Huntington Museum of Art, Huntington, WV; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Houston, TX; Pizzuti Collection, Columbus, OH; and the Taylor Art Collection, Denver, CO.
Lee is the recipient of awards and accolades including the Walter Gropius Master Artist Fellowship, Huntington, WV; the Peter S. Reed Foundation Achievement Award, New York, NY; and the Nikon 2000 Grand Prize, among others.
The artist lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.
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PATRICK PHILIP LEE | LOS ANGELES TIME
WESTERN PROJECTS
30 JUNE 2011
by David Pagel
Patrick Lee’s gorgeous portraits of tough young men are great works of art because they entice you to imagine what it might be like to live in someone else’s skin.
If you don’t like yourself, that can be a relief. If you’re in love with yourself, it can be scary. And if you’re like most folks, your self is too complex to be captured by such black-and-white, all-or-nothing descriptions.
Just where one’s self ends and someone else’s otherness begins is the question Lee’s drawings ask of everyone who lays eyes on them and is not scared off by their power.
At Western Project, the 41-year-old artist’s second solo show in Los Angeles consists of seven graphite drawings of seven men’s heads and a video that is a digital version of a slide show. Made up of still images of guys Lee has photographed in cities across the country, his untitled video also functions as a good old-fashioned sketchbook, where the Montana-born, L.A.-based artist gathers observations, studies his subjects, tries out ideas and experiments with compositions.
His drawings are masterpieces in which nothing is left to chance. Absolutely everything is executed with patient perfectionism. Each pore, hair, thread of fabric and glistening highlight is a testament to Lee’s devotion to the observable world and to the human sentiments embodied by men who look like they might never let a lover get this close to them.
Collectively titled “Deadly Friends,” Lee’s drawings go heads and shoulder above those types of virtuoso draftsmanship that are cold and detached, their clinical accuracy a sorry substitute for sympathetic engagement. In contrast, Lee’s quietly stunning works are imbued with so much warmth, light and sensitivity that you’d have to be a brute not to see their beauty and a thug not to be touched by their empathy for others, who are nothing — and everything — like our selves.
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Lee was a winner in the Tom of Finland Foundation’s 2003 Emerging Erotic Artist Contest.
It is Lee’s masterful draftsmanship which conveys his understanding of his subjects and the core issue of masculinity. Each image is hand drawn without Photoshop or digital assistance. Akin to a sculptor, the artist invests each facial pore and hair with microscopic detail so the image resonates as a complete emotional picture; an internal and external illumination. In the lineage of Chuck Close and Manet’s realism, Lee forges a contemporary investigation of class and gender roles. His conceptual drawings are compelling mirrors of our societal desire for alpha – heroic strength and control. Yet his subjects are not ideal figures for they embody other human traits such as pride, anger, or pain. As complex portraits, Lee’s images expose the illusion of ‘maleness’ as acquired, not necessarily inherent; external gender characteristics as ever changing and adaptable according to need; a game of adaption and replication to an end.
Lee is currently included in, Drawings for the New Century, at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. He has exhibited at Ameringer McEnery Yohe in New York, the Francis Young Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York, the Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, North Carolina, Maureen Paley Gallery, London, and the Marc Selwyn Gallery in Los Angeles. He is in the collection of the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas. He is also a recipient of the Peter S. Reed Foundation grant for 2006.