Rhys Lee
Australian Art Collector 2007
The paintings of Rhys Lee juxtapose the soft and the sinister, the innocent and the hidden, the cheerfully superficial and the unknowable. A noted colourist who has had a rapidly growing reputation in Australia and overseas, Lee professes to be more interested in line and colour than in subject matter. He has a strong affinity for paint and clearly revels in the medium and uses it with conviction and originality. Lees' work appeals at many levels: the sheer sensual enjoyment of the way he combines colour is the most immediate: his repudiation of conventional forms and space challenge one's consciousness and, at a more subtle level, he locks into an almost primitive representational awareness.
His subject matter is taken from the street - people doing ordinary things and looking eerily simplistic in Lees' pared-back representation of form. The ghostly, dreamy quality of many of his images speaks directly and ironically to the ephemeral quality of our notion of self. The overriding quality of the work, however, is a lightness of touch and a sense that all could dissolve and disperseon just a few moments. His Brisbane dealer, Jacqueline Houghton notes that Lee 'delights in the absurdity and the play between over-charged gestural strokes, shapes and colours. His works take time to unfold, for their meanings are deliberately elusive, even fugitive.'
Lee has a Bachelor of Visual Arts in Graphic Design from Queensland College of Art at Griffith University. He has exhibited with great success in Australia and was invited in 2004 to have a solo show at Volume Gallery, New York. Other career highlights have included the painting of the interior walls of RMIT Gallery, Melbourne and his billboard on the Hero Building (cnr Russell and Little Collins St, Melbourne) as part of the 2004 New Wave Festival.
(Rhys Lee is represented by Tim Olsen Gallery, Sydney.)