Lee Bae

Exhibition

Foundation W

The Wilmotte Foundation presented “Venice Wood Water” from June 16 to November 24 2019, a work by Lee Bae, commissioned by the Foundation for the 58th International Art Exhibition in collaboration with the Perrotin Gallery.

Bae and I first met in 1999.

A beautiful complicity was born.

Together we have created a well-received exposition at the foundation Fernet Branca.

Lee Bae is foremost a great poet.

His poetry is expressed through different mediums, but always with a certain sensibility, finesse, and subtility; whether by using fire in burning wood, which once calcinated and sectioned brings to light large landscapes, or by using entire bundles of wood which he sets alight before transforming them into sculptures. It also arrives that he smashes wooden panels, splintering them into pieces, which when placed side by side become a form of naturalist writing.

Enormous draftsman, Lee Bae wields a pencil with delicacy and precision, creating still life drawings worthy of the greatest scientific drawings of the enlightenment.

Originally, Lee Bae is a talented drawer, delicately using the pencil to create still life drawings worthy of the greatest scientific drawings of the 18th century.

I find there exists a beautiful resonance between Venice and the work of Lee Bae: his assemblies of carbonized bundles of wood, resembling the columns of Venetian palaces, and his large splashes of black, evoking the waters of the lagoon, spread across immaculate wax surfaces.

Jean-Michel Wilmotte, Juin 2019