Almine Rech Shanghai is pleased to present Leelee Kimmel’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, also her first solo show in China. Given the current health situation in Shanghai, the exhibition will only be visible via the online viewing room.
Leelee Kimmel’s paintings have always sustained this vibe, her abstract shapes from her very first show proclaiming themselves biomorphs, and avowing kinship with the art of Surrealism of Joan Miró, Yves Tanguy, and Roberto Matta-Echaurren. The most immediately apparent stylistic or formal quality is the impression of rapid, perfervid mark making. Her thick impastos nonetheless appear as if racing, colors violently switching ON/OFF ON/OFF, furious binaries. And this gestural ferment, these leaping and bounding motions indicate a desire for relentless movement within the confines of the picture plane and no less within the viewer, who may come to long for those moments of intersection or erasure in Kimmel’s work when everything goes quiet, stops pullulating: when this foreign-seeming tumult proffers moments of respite, or silent meditation.
- David Rimanelli, writer and independent curator