pink ball, 1998, acrylic on woodblock, 12 x 11 inches

Riverside Gallery presents a solo exhibition, stories within traces, by painter sooim lee, featuring 66 works in painting/drawing, etching, and monoprint. The exhibition runs from December 12, 2025, to January 15, 2026, with an opening reception on December 20, from 4 to 7 PM.

sooim lee’s painting vocabulary is traverses between painterly lyrical abstraction and figuration, involving layers of colors and meaning that one must excavate through to discover the connections within the painter’s trail of visions and feelings. By painting over previous works and marks in transparent washes and with thinly textured scumbling technique, lee forges new meanings and experiences through the superimposition of colors, layers, and traces. lee’s highly modernistic painterly language allows for an aesthetic experience that defies the laws of nature and the limits of human imagination, approaching the territory of the poetic, metaphorical, and metaphysical. lee’s paintings both constitute a final output of a creative play and a rejection of realist perspectives in terms of their limitations from new possibilities and nature of being grounded in physical reality: lee’s humanist visions propose a human potential without limit, where cities bend to the logic of dreamlike cubist compilations and humans play pool with the stars in the night sky. Core to this lyrical language is its openness to multiple perspectives and the primacy of human imagination as a means of expanding the potential for mutual understanding and forming of relations, across space and time. Beings who parted from unity at the moment of creation and who feel loneliness of separation find meaningful dialogue and solace through lee’s masterpieces that communicate visually with great warmth and compassion.

sooim lee (b. Seoul, Korea) moved to New York in 1981 and continues to live and work in New York. She received a B.F.A. and M.F.A. in Painting from Hong-Ik University in Seoul (1976 and 1978, respectively) and a M.A. in Printmaking from New York University (1984). Recent performance: Calling Back, Calling Forward, From This Blanket, Print Center New York, NY (2024); Recent solo exhibition: SOO IM LEE: across time and place, Art Projects International, New York (2017); Recent group exhibitions include 30 years: Art Projects International, NY (2023); Color as Space, Art projects International, NY (2022); Paper and process 3, Art projects International, NY (2021); New works, Art projects International, NY (2019); Summer selections, Art projects International, NY (2018); Marking 2, Art Projects International, NY (2016); Summer Selections, Art Projects International, NY (2014); Curate NYC, Rush Arts Gallery, NY (2013); Intersecting Lines, Art Projects International, NY (2012); 911 Arts: A Decade Later, Commons Gallery, New York University (2011), Absence, Queens Museum of Art: Partnership Gallery, NY (2010); and Irrelevant, Arario Gallery, NY (2010).

lee creates bold, multilayered, intuitively derived paintings with imagery and detail that bring to mind complex three-dimensional spatial structures, intricately woven mesh, and lush forests of lines. These paintings in varying sizes and executed in oil on canvas, employ a variety of brushstroke-like forms in an array of vibrant colors. Through repetitive gestures and markings, lee builds a web of accumulated lines and overlays that activates the surface. lee’s works on paper and canvas are rendered in delicate yet bold layers of red, blue and green. The movement of her brush strokes compliment the tonal shifts in color, creating a lively interplay of superimposed layers.

stories within traces:

Life is a continuum of traces — moments that appear, fade, and quietly remain.
The light of a single day, the people who passed by, and the landscapes that lingered in my memory have all settled within me, leaving behind colors and lines.
This exhibition is an unfolding of those silent stories shaped by time.

Each line and form in my work is not a literal depiction, but a residue of feeling and memory. These traces whisper their own stories — sometimes clear, sometimes blurred — yet always connected to something deeply human and universal.

Through painting, drawing, and printmaking, I have long sought to hold onto what has passed. And through that process, I have come to realize that traces never truly disappear; they transform, returning as new stories.

I hope this exhibition becomes a quiet dialogue between my traces and the stories that live within each viewer’s memory.

Press:

The Korea Daily

The Korea Times