Details:

This painting depicts a tree in the artist’s neighborhood. The subject has been pruned to accommodate an object at its center, as if the gap in its form is its sole purpose.
Unframed
Signed

① Artwork:

Bush

This painting depicts a tree in the artist’s neighborhood. The subject has been pruned to accommodate an object at its center, as if the gap in its form is its sole purpose. The artist rendered the vein-like branches with precision, contrasting their sharp lines with soft gradations of color in the surrounding leaves and grass. This velvety and luminous composition was made with egg tempera on a traditional chalk gesso surface.

Lee Maxey’s paintings fixate on familiar domestic spaces, warping the mundane into queer emblems of a controlling and mystical world. The artist's works revel in a world of spiritual otherness that borders on paranoia, creating spaces that are open to multiple interpretations. The artist's religious upbringing, which she chose to leave, primed her to seek meaning from the ordinary. Maxey paints with egg tempera, an ancient medium that further connects her work to a long history of persuasion and beauty. 

Specs:

15 inches
18.75 inches

③ Artist:

Lee Maxey

Lee Maxey’s paintings fixate on familiar domestic spaces, warping the mundane into queer emblems of a controlling and mystical world. The artist paints with egg tempera, an ancient medium historically used for both persuasion and the creation of beauty. Drawing from her religious upbringing which she has since left, Maxey’s paintings revel in a world of spiritual otherness that borders on paranoia.

BIO:

Lee Maxey was born in Arkansas. The artist received an MFA in 2016 from Boston University in Boston, Massachusetts and a BFA in 2011 from the University of Central Arkansas in Conway, Arkansas.

Solo exhibitions of Maxey’s work include: Be Not Afraid at Olympia in New York City (2021); and Raptured at the artist-run space Hercules Art in New York City (2019).

Group exhibitions that have included Maxey’s work have taken place at: Able Baker Contemporary in Portland, Maine; and The Bureau of General Services: Queer Division in New York City. 

Maxey’s work was shown in a two-person exhibition at the 2019 SPRING/BREAK Art Show in New York City. 

Maxey is an alumna of the Fire Island Artist Residency in New York and the Hercules Art Studio Program in New York City.

Maxey lives and works in Brooklyn, New York, where she teaches painting at Brooklyn College.

Lee Maxey:
Bush, 2022
Egg tempera on panel
18.8 × 15.0 inches /