LEE BAE: BETWEEN

Perrotin New York is pleased to present Between, an immersive exhibition of new work by artist Lee Bae.

September 6 – October 19, 2024

As a leading Korean minimalist artist, Lee Bae pursues a pure expression of form. The core of his practice is a formal study on the color black and materiality. Over the last four decades, he has mastered the use of charcoal as a medium for his work.

In his practice, charcoal acts as a physical representation of the cycle of life, renewal, and personal histories. Until the early 2000s, Lee Bae worked exclusively with raw charcoal to create minimal, mosaic-like assemblages of charred wooden shards and sculptural arrangements of carbonized trunks. In the last five years, he has experimented with charcoal ink painting as well as the material possibilities of bronze.

Since 2019, the artist has been experimenting with simple actions in his Brushstroke paintings, executed with singular continuous black gestures on paper. In these paintings, shades of ink create depth on a flat surface, conjuring three-dimensional space through swooping translucent strokes. In grand motions, one trace is followed by another, each building off the previous, creating an archive of condensed energy.

Wielding the brush is of utmost importance, as he listens to the tools as much as himself. Once started, he cannot hesitate as each stroke records his movement over time on the paper. In this way, the performance-based gestures of Between are a visual concretization of the fleeting temporal experience.

Lee Bae’s Between invites viewers to live in the now, to reconsider our relationship with past, present, and future. By creating physical space for reflection, his work materializes the immaterial, preserving time through gesture and form.