Marta Lee is a painter of objects both mundane and precious, from found textiles, ceramics, and old books to favorite albums, family heirlooms, and toys from childhood. Lee’s paintings are a material archive of her life, while also functioning as vehicles for free experimentation with form and color, recording the experience of looking. Lee explains, “I feel like I’m the opposite of Philip Guston. He said 'I paint what I want to see,’ and I see what I want to paint. I never fully see an object until I am painting it. Often while rendering something, it surprises me with a pattern, color, or texture I wasn’t initially aware of,” a comment that demonstrates an intentional embrace of chance and process as essential components of her artistic practice.
In composing the still life setups, which serve as the basis for her paintings, Lee tries a range of possibilities, drawing from a cache of saved objects—everyday items and special ones alike. Many of these objects include things of intimate personal significance, such as old valentines, artworks by her mother, and baby blankets. Others simply catch Lee’s fancy, dazzling the eye with their striking or unusual colors and textures, like silk neckties and speckled shells or discarded bits of foil, cardboard, and paper. Color is a primary concern, becoming the predominant structuring component of her compositions, over which Lee meticulously builds up her imagery mark by mark. She is also drawn to unidentifiable objects, which conveyed in crayon and paint, become even more peculiar and abstract. Lee often paints the same items over and over, and with each iteration, they grow in mystery and significance.
Taking advantage of the increased scale of these recent paintings, Lee has been working more loosely, using larger brushes, and expanding her repertoire of marks and textures with materials including wax crayons and transfer paper. Her use of the latter allows her to work with more precision, standing in pleasant contrast to the more loosely painted passages. Considering painting to be essentially a history of mark making, and with a background in printmaking, Lee intuitively layers both shape and color into idiosyncratic compositions. Space is distorted, tilted, and stretched, showing objects from multiple perspectives. Despite their inherent flatness—with their large planes of color or pattern—some of these new paintings also include representations of windows or mirrors, extending and dividing space in unconventional ways, evident in larger works like Sill Life, 2023, and Solitaire (Day and Night), 2024. This latter work, depicting a view from her studio seen simultaneously at two different times of day, includes items as various as a crocheted textile by Lee’s Chinese grandmother, a green step stool recovered from the street, and a red Easter egg with a bunny on it, leftover from last year’s holiday decorations.
Lee’s interests in music and painting often converge, as is the case with Old and New World Order, 2025, a vertical work which features a 1983 album cover by Peter Saville for the band New Order, reproducing an image of a floral painting by French artist Henri Fantin-Latour. Lee is interested in these chains of reference and the sensory effects of further appropriating and transforming an image or object. In yet another work, 11:11, 2025, music and art again takes center stage. This painting shows a turntable gifted by a close friend which plays the record New Moon by Elliott Smith, an album which has personal meaning for Lee. This painting was made after some time away from the studio when Lee was reading a lot of Guston, whom she acknowledges as an influence. Here, as in other works, the autobiographical combines with the aesthetic, as Lee’s artistic choices reflect a combined interest in personal narrative and the desire to arrange a striking composition.
What I Want (To Paint), 2025, shows a painting within a painting, one prominently featuring a rainbow pride flag, lending the work its characteristic range of colors. A blue elephant, a printed scan of a painting by her mother, and an old Bob Dylan songbook count among items depicted. As with the previous work, in Prospect Park Kunstkabinett, 2025, the autobiographical importance of objects is hidden and hinted at simultaneously. Hacky sacks—one of which she received as a newborn—serve as surrogates for the artist herself and appear here alongside textiles gifted to Lee by her aunt, tinsel Christmas decorations saved from the trash, and a studio alarm clock, which flashes a number with special significance to Lee and her girlfriend.
Some new works feature novel formats, such as the horizontal blue painting Holding Hands (Friends and Family), 2025. An envelope with printed monkeys and bananas from her mother’s late cousin strikingly frames the left hand of the composition, symbolizing Lee’s sign in Chinese astrology and breaking up the jagged fields of color and texture. Perhaps the most enigmatic of her new works, much of what is painted remains obscure and abstract, manifesting how the recognizable and the unrecognizable often converge in visually interesting ways. Again typical of Lee’s practice and reflected in the work's title, this painting features depictions of multiple objects (including sculptures, drawings, and the shelf itself) which were made by close friends and family.
In conjunction with the exhibition, Tappeto Volante will host a conversation between artists Marta Lee and EJ Hauser on October 2, 2025 (6-7:30 pm). The gallery will also be open to the public during Gowanus Open Studios on October 18 & 19, 2025.
Written by Gilles Heno-Coe
Marta Lee (b. Moscow, ID) lives and works in Astoria, Queens. She received her BFA from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin. She works collaboratively with Anika Steppe under the moniker Frances Brady.
Lee has been a resident at the Fire Island Artist Residency, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Hercules Art Studio Program, and the Sam and Adele Golden Foundation for the Arts. Lee has exhibited nationally and internationally in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Austin, London, and Shenzhen.
She is a recipient of the 2024 Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant.
