Artist: Gowoon Lee

For the 7th exhibition at 36.1 projects, Mai 36 Galerie presents SHAVE AND A HAIRCUT, TWO BITS, Gowoon Lee’s first solo show in Switzerland. Television represents a fleeting form of collective memory. Lee navigates the tension between ultra-recognizable images and abstraction by isolating objects from familiar cartoon narratives.

The ‘singular' images that are depicted in Lee’s work function almost like words in her visual language, enabling the arrangement or combination of the paintings to create larger narratives. Within the exhibition space this interplay between individuality and collectivity creates a dynamic relationship among the artworks, where each piece communicates its own message while simultaneously enhancing and altering the context of its companions. By incorporating universal motifs that resonate across different cultures and backgrounds, Lee creates a shared emotional language, shaping individual encounters into a sense of unity and encouraging dialogue and reflection on common human experiences.

Lee completes each piece in a single sitting, engaging dynamically with each painting as she blurs, sharpens, isolates, crops, enlarges, or distorts the imagery. The result is a body of work that feels at once intimately familiar and profoundly foreign. By zooming in and out, oversharing and selectively omitting details, she explores the enduring aesthetic influence of these images.
While some of Lee’s subjects seem static and almost frozen in time, others, even within the confines of a flat pictorial space, appear in dynamic motion (as seen in Sylvester Dash, 2024). Lee recently started to look into the old animation technique known as 'smear,' where rapid movement is conveyed through image distortion. This approach connects to art history, drawing inspiration from works like Italian Futurist Giacomo Balla's Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash, which captures the essence of movement over time. The resulting interplay of transparencies and blurs imparts Lee’s animations with a distinctive expressiveness and depth.

Gowoon Lee carefully examines the relationship between memory, culture, and visual language, prompting us to reflect on the lasting impact such images hold in a rapidly changing world.

Born in South Korea in 1991, Gowoon Lee now lives and works in Düsseldorf, Germany. She studied at the University of Auckland, New Zealand (2014), and the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (2024). Recent solo exhibitions include Meredith Rosen Gallery New York 2023, 2022. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Rubell Museum Miami, FL.