05/19/2026
el n.k. lee (Chicago, b. Los Angeles) is a visual artist working in the field of expanded painting. She completed her BA at UC Berkeley in 2019, in a dual degree in Ethnic Studies and Studio Art. Her practice is an ongoing exploration into the power of physical mutability to confound signification and visual information.
By re-organizing the materials of painting, she draws a conflation between form and subject (the ‘structure’ with the ‘image’; the ‘artist’ with her ‘object’, etc.) in order to interrupt the visual signification of identity. In her work, the painting moves across disciplines, hybridizing sculpture, assemblage, and the readymade, creating a sense of ‘mutilation’ or ‘mutability’.
Lead by an interest in the grammars of art-making and visual culture, el constructs forms which aggregate and disaggregate qualifiers of ‘personhood’ (femininity and race), inviting viewers to place themselves in a space of self-indetermination. Painting, after all, is only ever idiomatic. Like the fact of your own body, the painting astonishes, embarasses, gives nothing when you ask and too much when you don’t. Unignorable, complacent, disruptive – the painted canvas, the visual surface, and the bodily plane is hyper-visible, mobile, and yet, it is not there at all.
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You can see el’s thesis work in “Too Much, Not Enough II” opening on Friday, May 22nd from 6-8PM.
For more info on the exhibition and to RSVP for the reception, visit the link in bio.
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Image 1: Studio portrait, 2026.
Image 2: “in unhealthy quarters,” 2026. Oil and artist’s hair on canvas, 12 x 18 inches.
Image 3: “over and over, over and over (ii),” 2026. Oil on canvas, 2.15 x 2.35 inches.
Image 4: “description: artist’s n**e four steps down from substrate,” 2026. variable.
Image 5-6: “three forms and a fold,” 2025. Oil, canvas, and oak. 72 x 49 inches.
