Contributed by Jason Andrew / In an explosion of color and clutter, Marta Lee’s new work, on view at Tappeto Volante in Gowanus, shakes up the revered tradition of still life painting. Lee fills her paintings with the “material archive of her life” – digital clock radios, toys from childhood, record albums, family heirlooms, and pride flags. She plays with how memory and context shape our visual experience, bringing perception into personal life and exploring the accrual of meaning through painting.
Marta Lee, Rainbow (Around Her Neck), 2024, acrylic, crayon, and graphite on linen over canvas, 58 x 54 inches
In Rainbow (Around Her Neck), Lee situates a speckled purse and apparently its contents against the bright colors of a pride flag. Understanding that such objects carry histories and affective resonance, Lee paints them with care, insisting on the beauty of the ordinary and the weight of the mundane.
Marta Lee, I practiced the color names while she played solitaire (Day and Night), 2024, acrylic, crayon, and pastel on canvas, 48 x 60 inches
Lee skillfully merges figurative imagery (object, still life, shelf, interior) with abstraction, flattening space and using texture and pattern to frame but also visually interrupt. While her compositions can appear didactic, they convey sufficient philosophical and emotive ambiguity to remain open-ended. I practiced the color names while she played solitaire (Day and Night) feels distinctly akin to Jasper Johns’ Racing Thoughts, which he painted in 1983. Both artists employ personally charged objects, embrace the tension between what is recognizable and what isn’t, and thrive in ambiguity. In Johns’s work, the tension shows how perception is unstable – how memory, material, and repeated viewings distort what we think we see. Lee utilizes it to evoke memory, reclaim domesticity as a queer space, and embrace the freedom to associate. In a separate work by Lee titled Prisma, her concentric arrangement of colored pencils seems all to attuned to Johns’s targets.
Throughout the show, it’s curious how Lee plays with the concept of time. In 11:11, the show’s title piece, a digital clock sits on a set of speakers atop a green cabinet alongside a record player spinning Elliott Smith’s New Moon. Like much of Lee’s work, the composition seems scribbled into place, but this one is unusually frenetic, as if she hurried to capture the scene before the clock advanced another digit. Lee leans hard into the concept of time passing, only to demonstrate, through this painting, that time can stay just where it is.
Lee builds Old and New Order (Diary) around textile patterns and resting objects that seem either to lean or to be reflected in a mirror. Sale receipts are taped to a brown frame, and a pile of hacky sacks sits next to a red vase. Balancing the composition is a New Order album cover featuring a floral painting by Henri Fantin-Latour – a still life within a still life. “Lee is interested in these chains of reference and the sensory effects of further appropriating and transforming an image or object,” writes Gilles Heno-Coe, who introduced me to Lee’s work in 2021.
From painting to painting, excitement springs from Lee’s ability to seamlessly foreground collage-like assemblages layered into compositions whose space is warped, tilted, or mirrored. It’s gratifying to see Lee paint big with such confidence, privileging intimacy and multiplicity as she treads a path between knowing and seeing, living and making.
“Marta Lee: 11:11,” Tappeto Volante, 126 13th Street, Brooklyn, NY. Through October 26, 2025.
About the author: Jason Andrew is an independent curator and writer based in Cypress Hills, Brooklyn. Follow him on Instagram: @jandrewarts
It seems that Ms. Lee draws viewers’ attention to spaces that might otherwise go unnoticed or overlooked—perhaps as a way to reframe the discourse around temporality, or even around potential sites of the future, despite the lingering presence of the past.
Great review! I was at the opening and knew I was seeing excellent, important work and now I understand why. The reference to Jasper Johns’ work was particularly insightful.