Sarah Lee: Deeper

New York, NY | albertz benda is pleased to present Deeper, Sarah Lee's second solo exhibitionwith the gallery, on view from September 10 – October 10, 2026. In this new body of work, Lee expands 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 manipulation of the horizon line, a fundamental structure of the landscape. Where her earlier nocturnal scenes – snow fields, darkened forests, starlit skies – were viewed from above, here the perspective shifts across the works. In paintings such as Before Dark, the composition is evenly divided between mountains

and water. As one progresses through the exhibition, the horizon rises gradually until the viewer is fully submerged, where new sightlines and rules of physics are established.

 

This perspective challenges the sensory norms of Western landscape traditions. One thinks of Caspar David Friedrich's Romantic landscapes, where a male figure on a mountain peak turns his back on the viewer and gazes down upon the world, or of nineteenth-century American landscape painting's portrayal of "empty" land waiting for settlers: a stable, aerial view that enforces a privileged position over the environment. In such traditions, water remains a mirror-

like surface, passively reflecting the world above it.

 

In Lee's work, it is the landscape that dominates the viewer. Her oil paint registers this directly: lustrous texture and layered brushwork render the resistance and pressure of the underwater world, while varying saturations of blue – from luminous turquoise to deep ultramarine – reflect its depth. Different brushes distinguish land from sea, with extremely fine, soft brushes reserved for water and rougher, more textured ones for land, rock, and current. Together they capture thesubtle movements of aquatic plants, the viscosity of water mingled with oil and other substances,

and 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 blur. Pulling from illustrations of wave patterns in hydraulic journals and nineteenth-century science fiction, such as Alphonse de Neuville's plates for Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and William Saville-Kent's fantastical marine botanical illustrations, she constructs scenes that are logically plausible yet visually unfamiliar, a world that feels discovered rather than invented.

 

Lee's paintings offer access to a world that would otherwise be impossible to inhabit. Theseunderwater scenes are seductive and enchanting, yet a persistent sense of unease runs beneath the surface: the human body cannot exist here. The paintings hold that contradiction, drawing the

viewer in while reminding them they do not belong.