On September 7th, New York gallery Albertz Benda opened its fall season with a solo show of new works by Korean-born, New York–based artist Sarah Lee, whose sublime yet foreboding paintings of moonlit nature draw on the slick oil techniques of Old Masters with brushstrokes that appear, from afar, almost too perfect to be handmade. Lee said she doesn’t track celestial bodies, but she does browse NASA’s website toview the “unreal” telescopic images of galaxies. Her work has changed since the pandemic: “When every day in New York felt almost like perpetual night, I began using darker palettes more frequently,” said the artist, who paints only at night in her East Village studio where photos of the Northern Lights, French illustrations, and are a production of John Everett Millais’s Ophelia (1851–52) hang on the wall.
"The nighttime has a silence and inherent loneliness,” she continued. “It reminds me of my vulnerability as a human, and acknowledging it oddly consoles me.” Her dusk landscapes are
unpopulated, aside from occasional illuminated insects, and rendered in colors as saturated as computer images or dreamscapes. She cited Surrealists Giorgio de Chirico and Yves Tanguy as inspirations.
Today, the contexts and meanings of nighttime symbols have shifted, though history is never too far out of mind. Styles have shifted, too. Like in Lee’s work, many new nocturnes are playing with the distinction between digital and analogue techniques.
