Sarah Lee: Deeper
New York, NY | albertz benda is pleased to present Deeper, Sarah Lee's second solo exhibition with the gallery, on view from September 10 – October 10, 2026. In this new body of work, Lee shifts her focus from nightscapes to waterscapes, opening new compositional, material, and conceptual lines of inquiry.
No humans are depicted; instead, a narrative emerges through Lee's engagement with water's mutability: its passage between solid, mist, and liquid states, and the shift from transparent shallows to mysterious depths. The materiality of the paint itself becomes a way of registering these phases directly, as varying densities and textures absorb, reflect, and transmit light much as water itself does.
Lustrous texture and layered brushwork render the resistance and pressure of hydraulic forces, while varying saturations of blue - from deep ultramarine to luminous turquoise - reflect its temperature and density. Different brushes distinguish land from sea, forest from lake, with extremely fine, soft brushes reserved for water, and rougher, more textured ones for mountains and rock. Together they capture the subtle sensations of aquatic plants, the viscosity of water mingled with oil and other substances, and the refracting light and shadow moving through turbulence.
Where her previous work drew from nature photographs and documentaries, Lee's practice has gradually pulled away from direct reference in favor of fragmentary visual sources: images created at the edge of the known, where documentation and imagination entangle. Drawing on nineteenth-century literature such as Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, Fitz Henry Lane's seascapes, and Wu Tsang's video installation Of Whales, she constructs scenes that are logically plausible yet sensorily unfamiliar - an aquatic world inaccessible to humans.
This focus on water also engages with Western traditions of landscape painting. One thinks of Caspar David Friedrich's Romantic landscapes, where a male figure overlooks a tumultuous sea, or of nineteenth-century American landscape painting's portrayal of "empty" land waiting for settlers. The land is rendered in service to the viewer, rather than existing on its own terms.
In these new paintings, the landscape pushes back. There is a distinct feeling that more is hidden in the scene than what meets the eye: in the recesses of the water, underneath the ice, obscured by an outcropping of coral. Water sustains life on Earth, yet its depths remain beyond human survival - an essential environment that is also fundamentally inhospitable to us. Lee's paintings offer access to this world. The paintings hold that contradiction, drawing the viewer in while reminding them they do not belong.
