nada miami, 2022

Lee Maxey

TD Bank Curated Spotlight

Booth #7.03

November 30 - December 3, 2022

Olympia presents new paintings by Brooklyn-based artist Lee Maxey. Lee’s egg tempera paintings concentrate on familiar domestic spaces, transforming the mundane into queer emblems of a mystical world. The images revel in a spiritual otherness that borders on paranoia. Maxey’s religious upbringing, that she left many years ago, primed her to seek meaning in the ordinary rather than the extraordinary; and she uses this impulse to gaze back. Lee paints with egg tempera, an ancient medium that further connects her subject to its long history as a tool of persuasion and beauty.

Her new body of work includes images of shadows that, though grasped tightly within a still moment of time, are made of ever-shifting colors that are a reminder of time and being’s capricious nature. At first, several of these paintings appear to be concrete presentations of reality, but exaggerated shapes and brilliant colors mingle with ceiling lights and discrete edges of walls to make a phantasmal image. Lee’s painting Time Will Tell turns an alarm clock into a foreboding fortune teller, its face reading as a constellation rather than simply a teller of time. Tricky Triangle likewise turns a harmless object—a simple peg-board game that the artist grew up with—into an exaggerated statement on control. The extreme shadows cast by the pegs refer back to the unidentified shadows in several other paintings, though the scale of Tricky Triangle causes it to loom over the others in our presentation.

The majority of Lee’s paintings are of a modest scale, using intimacy to invite deliberation, meditation, and cautious regarding. 

NADA Miami 2022 will showcase a diverse selection of 146 galleries, art spaces, and nonprofit organizations spanning over 40 cities around the globe including Paris, Tokyo, Dubai, Toronto, Buenos Aires, and Copenhagen. This year’s fair includes over 80 NADA members and 37 first-time exhibitors.

The fair will also feature NADA Presents, the organization’s signature programming series of conversations, performances, and events, as well as a Curated Spotlight, a special section highlighting a selection of galleries organized by a renowned curator and presented in partnership with TD Bank. Olympia’s presentation of Maxey’s work is chosen to be part of the latter.