Four paintings of models in jeans – visible only from thigh to waist – line the wall of Jennifer J Lee’s current show of paintings at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery like products in an online store. Lee’s characteristic small-scale renditions of clothing, food, and people recall and derive from the kind of photographic images we encounter in daily digital life and even the scale of her work – the show’s largest painting is just 22 x 15 inches – operates more in keeping with the size of a screen than an expansive picture plane. Nevertheless, painted on thick jute, its weave rough enough to suggest pixelation, Lee’s painting are resolutely material, smartly engaging the phenomenon of image-saturated life one oil painting at a time. (On view in Tribeca through Feb 22nd).
