Sarah Lee

Sarah Lee (b. 1988, Seoul, South Korea; lives and works in Brooklyn, US) creates oil paintings that foreground the interplay of elemental forces, where aerial, aquatic, sylvan, lacustrine, and lithic motifs converge into speculative landscapes. Her works collapse distinctions between reality and imagination, twilight and daybreak, the atmospheric and the meteorological. Working in deep, saturated tones of blue, green, and violet, Lee builds her compositions through layered washes and finely tuned palettes. Her imagery evokes forest clearings, celestial skies, and distant horizons, shaped by quiet reflection and poetic ambiguity. At the same time, the viscous and luminous materiality of her surfaces complicates any notion of these subjects as purely otherworldly or detached from human experience. Notably, her earliest landscapes were painted during the pandemic, their serenity and mystery emerging from a socially shaped and collectively shared moment. Rooted in her reflections on recent global shifts, Lee’s practice unsettles conventional distinctions between visual representation and elemental process, history and fiction, political ecology and landscape. Recent solo exhibitions include Quiet Days at Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles (2025) and Two Skies at Albertz Benda, New York (2023). Lee received her BFA (2011) and MFA (2017) from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.