Hyein Lee is a painter whose works represent people, objects and landscapes from the perspective of the processual and the passage of time.
In the exhibition Sketch Book the artist will be showing new painterly snapshots, a large number of mainly small-format paintings, the motifs of which she tracked down outside – at the interface of city, humanity and nature. They can be divided thematically into three groups of work.
For the first group, last summer Lee went to Planufer at Landwehrkanal daily, at midnight. Due to the darkness, which pushed the technical aspect of painting into a back seat, the paintings tend to be a rather intuitive realization of people’s moods in the summer nights, and of specific smells or memories. Another group of works was produced on the occasion of a journey the artist made in the area around Helmstedt, the former border-crossing point when heading for West Berlin. Here, Lee painted the lake Lappwaldsee, a bathing lake that is slowly forming in a former open-cast lignite mine. Lee’s latest works were produced on the spot in the areas of allotment gardens around Baumschulenweg and Plaenterwald in Berlin-Treptow. By contrast to earlier paintings, which were created in a laborious process in the studio from her memory of the places visited, the new works were produced in a short time but within the context of numerous, repeated visits – for the artist, this has been an important process of adaptation to new surroundings.