Alexis Lee
Alexis Lee
Plus VAT if applicable
Encountering Mercurius, 2020
Acrylic and oil on canvas
100 x 76 x 4 cm
About this work
The Mercurius presents itself in many shapes. In alchemy, it is the prima materia or divine essence in the depths of matter. Jung often referred to it as a primordial vessel, continuously churning the opposing forces of creative and destructive energies; ultimately completing its cycle with the unification of consciousness with the unconscious, where corners of the infinite are found within the finite spirit.
About Alexis Lee
Alexis Lee (b. 1992, Los Angeles, CA) is an American painter and sculptor. She received her BFA from Cornell University, New York, in 2014, and her MA from the Royal College of Art, London, in 2020. Lee studies the collective and personal unconscious through mythology and folklore. Archetypes, symbols, and patterns in comparative mythology collect the mysterious and provocative vocabularies of generations of diverse cultures. The artist explores these various tales and iterations, allowing her to constantly develop and reshape narratives of creation, as well as the void before creation. These images play out across her textured works, merging and resurfacing as contemporary depictions of the unknown, embedded in the emotional and psychological fabric of humanity.
Figures that wander this predatory plane are violently abbreviated or anatomically outrageous, capturing spectral imprints of the human condition. Masquerading in these shadows of the human shape, they work to overcome their vessels and stretch the boundaries of being. Lee often takes knives to her surfaces to release and disturb the conflicting energies of textures and forms, encouraging her work to emerge through the exposed layers of process. Using gesture and resistance to form lines of destruction, she seeks to introduce and collapse order and trace the mind losing its way. These markings passionately tell stories of their creation, of bodies caught in the act of becoming.
Education
2020 Royal College of Art, London, MA Fine Art
2014 Cornell University, New York, BA Fine Art with Minor in French
Group Exhibitions
2021 (Forthcoming) The Value, CICA Museum, Gimpo, South Korea
2021 (Forthcoming) New Futures Digital: RCA Focus, Kovet.Art (online)
2021 Tides Always Turn, AucArt (online)
2020 50/50, Fold Gallery, London
2020 Beacon, Josh Lily Gallery (online)
2020 RCA2020, Royal College of Art, London
2020 Final, Not Over, Unit 1 Gallery, London
2020 SNAPSHOT, Hockney Gallery, London
2019 GIFC Velvet Ropes, Nevven Gallery, Goethenberg, Sweden
2019 GIFC Velvet Ropes, House of Vans, London
2019 WIP Show, Royal College of Art, London
2014 Neon - Oral - Abîmes, Olive Tjaden Gallery, Ithaca, NY
2013 Dos and Donuts, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY
2013 fff, Olive Tjaden Gallery, Ithaca, NY
2013 Cornell in Rome, Palazzo Santacroce, Rome, Italy
2012 The Robert F. Bean Show, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY