ART CITIES:London-Leelee Kimmel

Leelee Kimmel, (nee Sobieski) has been painting privately for years, even when Kimmel rose up as Hollywood star after appearing in Stanley Kubrick’s film “Eyes Wide Shut” (1999), she covered the inside of her trailers in plastic so she could paint. Now after her first solo exhibition in New York, Leelee Kimmel presents her first solo exhibition in London.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo Simon Lee Gallery Archive

Leelee Kimmel’s solo exhibition “Wormhole” is part of Simon Lee Gallery’s Viewing Room programme. In her latest work, Kimmel presents a series of large-scale abstract paintings that are confrontational in both colour and dimension, exploring themes of creation and destruction. The immersive element of her work is further developed through sculptural pieces and a five-minute Virtual Reality work that invites total submergence into the deep space of Kimmel’s creative world. “In my paintings there’s a lot about energy and vibrations and the whole world being connected” as she says. The large-format paintings feature graphic shapes clustered in thick multilayered pools of bright acrylic paint, which weave across fields of solid white or black. The paintings are imbued with a restless energy and freedom that is intrinsically linked with how the artist creates her works. The resulting compositions deliberately move in and out of representation, sensuous and strict, gloss and matte, tangled and full. The complex patch-work of imagery, consisting of crosshatch and opposing vector-like lines and patterns as well as interrupting biomorphic forms, has an otherworldly quality. Alongside the paintings, Kimmel presents 3D printed sculptures that have been manipulated and painted. Sculpture is almost prefigured in her painting’s brushstrokes, which are so thick they seem to strain to be on their own plane. In fully sculptural medium, however, we see a version of the figures from the paintings, but with dimensionality, and without the field of color.  Kimmel found that the medium of virtual reality allowed her to explore themes of creation and destruction. In the adjoining gallery, she continues the journey through her constructed landscape by presenting a virtual reality facet to the exhibition that takes us on a five-minute uplifting voyage into the fictional worlds of her paintings, where the figures have both the dimensionality of the sculpture and the color field of the painting.

Info: Simon Lee Gallery, 12 Berkeley Street, London, Duration: 4/7-30/8/18, Days & Hours: Mon-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.simonleegallery.com