Jennie Jieun Lee

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Jennie Jieun Lee is an artist who over the years has challenged conventions of ceramic sculpture, embracing the inherent vulnerability of the clay medium. Across installations, busts, vessels, and painting, Lee’s works accumulate indices both deliberate and accidental, grafts that both decorate and distort. Firing works in various states of uprightness and collapse, Lee also imparts ceramic’s requisite hollowness in another reflexive maneuver. References to personal memories and gestural painting abound in Lee’s work: the artist covers her busts and vessels in liberal pours of glaze, in addition to working in two dimensions. Transferring the immediacy and authenticity conferred upon gestural painting to sculpture, Lee disrupts a medium that is often associated with the domestic.

Recent solo exhibitions include Cooper Cole, Toronto, Canada (2021); Halsey McKay Gallery, East Hampton (2020, 2018); and Martos Gallery, New York (2019, 2015). She is the recipient of several grants including Art Matters (2019), The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2017), and the Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant (2016) and Artadia (2015). In September 2022, she opened an exhibition titled Maria with Martos Gallery. Lee is a Professor of the Practice in ceramics at SMFA TUFTS in Boston, Massachusetts.