ART-PRESENTATION: Lee Ufan

In many ways, Lee Ufan’s practice is a metaphor for the austere simplicity and philosophical point of view that the artist embodies in his work. His paintings in a reduced vocabulary, offer the viewer a unique perspective on the nature of the painting process and provoke an intense spiritual response. Lee Ufan’s work combines an aesthetic vibration coupled with a deep resonance and calm.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Galerie Kamel Mennour Archive

After the opening of his exhibition at Château La Coste, Lee Ufan is exhibiting at two spaces of galerie kamel mennour, 12 watercolours from 1983 are on presentation in  the galerie’s new space on the Rue Matignon in the space on the Rue du Pont de Lodi a series of paintings whose astonishing colours and vibratos signal a new direction for the artist. Every one of Lee Ufan’s works is a beginning, an existential point, an event from which the exploration of an infinite, unknown, though vital world unfolds. This adventure takes place in a dialogue with the work. It is a question of setting in motion the creative process that will open art up to its own life. It will allow the viewer to enter into a dance scored to feeling. For Lee Ufan pictorial creation is a solitary practice: “I must, in my painting, challenge myself alone. The event that takes place between the canvas and myself is almost a secret rite, completely closed to the surrounding world”. Lee Ufan was the initiator and the theoretician of Mono-ha . Between 1967 and 1970, this movement in Japan brought together artists who showed art to be a process between two things or between a thing and space. The Mono-ha artists, who have sometimes been linkened to the Minimalists and the artists of Arte Povera, wanted to pace out, to make a survey of relationships with the outside by setting up spatial relationships. This relationship between the interior, the exterior, and space is still present in the work of Lee Ufan.

Info: Galerie Kamel Mennour, 6 rue du Pont de Lodi, Paris, Duration: 3/6-23/7-16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00 & 28 avenue Matignon, Paris, Duration: 22/6-23/7/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00,  www.kamelmennour.com