David Nolan Gallery Welcomes Young-Jae Lee Back for Exhibition Exploring Space, Motion, and Time Through Pottery
For the first time since 2004, David Nolan Gallery is exhibiting the work of Korean master potter Young-Jae Lee. The artist’s work is a reflection of her Eastern upbringing and Western skillset, as she was raised in a traditional Confucian and Buddhist family and began her ceramics journey in Seoul before emigrating to Germany. She eventually opened her own workshop near Heidelberg, and later took over as director of Keramische Werkstatt Margaretenhöhe in Essen, where she rekindled the Bauhaus legacy of classic, accessible design while adding a touch of the elegant and function forms of her native Korea. “Lee humbly refers to herself as a ‘potter’, though her vessels easily stand alongside other works of art in terms of their radiance, complexity, and sublimity,” says David Nolan. “They are highly aesthetic works of art that need no embellishment—they are profound in their simplicity.” Her aesthetically wondrous work has philosophical ties to the concept of space, motion, and time; the act of creating ceramics involves countless revolutions around a point representing passage of time, the shape is reliant on the hands of the potter, and the final creation inhabits a space of its own. The exhibition, “Young-Jae Lee: Forms from the Earth,” is on view through December.
—A.S.
