Vertical Gallery’s kaleidoscopic group exhibition ‘ASCENDING’ spotlights close to four dozen artists from across the urban-contemporary landscape — mainstays of our ongoing programming efforts, old friends returning after extended absences and new friends exhibiting with us for the very first time. 

Chicago-based conceptual artist E.LEE (@_e.lee_) needs no introduction to longtime Vertical patrons, but the depth and complexity of ”Picture No. 04” and “Picture No. 05,” the two pieces he created for ‘ASCENDING,’ demanded further inquiry. The first installment of Vertical’s new Process Spotlight series explores E.LEE’s inspirations and aspirations, told entirely in his own words.  

E.LEE: I began the Picture series earlier this year, while preparing for my solo exhibition at Krause Gallery in New York, ‘Nothing to See Here.’ I'd been thinking about that title for years. I wanted to fill a space with work that looked simple, maybe even empty, but seemed to change the longer you looked at it. By narrowing my focus, I began asking bigger questions about what art can do, and what makes something an artwork in the first place.

When you look at ”Picture No. 04” and “Picture No. 05,” they seem at first to be pictures in frames. But when you look a bit closer at the middle, where the image is supposed to be, there doesn't seem to be an image at all. You just see stripes or dots: a pattern that doesn't represent anything outside of itself. And the more you look, the harder it becomes to tell where the picture ends and the frame begins.

Roy Lichtenstein is the biggest influence on these pieces, and one of the biggest influences on my work in general. In “Stretcher Frame with Vertical Bar,” he painted the back of a canvas. The subject of the work is essentially the object the image is painted on. It is an image. It's representational. But it's an image representing itself.

And in his Reflection Series, Lichtenstein recreated paintings he'd made in the past, but painted them to look as though they were inside frames, behind glass and obscured by reflections. What excited me most about these works was that displaying the painting and looking at it became part of the image itself. That made me wonder: What if the entire image under the glass were obscured? What would the painting be of then?

That question led me to the Picture series.

These works create the idea of something that isn't actually there. There is no frame. There is no glass. There is no "picture" in the middle. But dividing the surface into a center and an outside creates a hierarchy. The individual elements are abstract, but their relationship to one another creates the representation.

The image is false, but the object is true. It's a picture with no picture. The work blurs the line between image and object, between abstract and representational.

These moments when something familiar changes, that perspective shift, is what I'm really interested in. You think you know what you're looking at, and then it all changes inside your head. But the work hasn't changed. You have. And somehow, that changes the work, too.

How far can I push the boundaries of an artwork before it becomes something else? Can two seemingly contradictory ideas exist at the same time and both be true? I've been trying to answer these questions for years. I suspect I'll be asking them for the rest of my life. I can't decide whether that's a curse or a blessing. Probably both. 

View and purchase E.LEE's work from the 'ASCENDING' Group Show Here