On View: John Lees
Online and by Appointment
March - May 2025
Bathtub, 1972-2010
Oil on canvas
40 1/4 x 48 in. 102.2 x 122 cm
JL12391
In the Park, 2008-2015
Oil on canvas
21 x 14 3/4 in.
JL15479
In the Park, 2008-2015
Oil on canvas
21 x 14 3/4 in.
JL15479
In the Park, 2008-2015
Oil on canvas
21 x 14 3/4 in.
JL15479
Barrymore (My Days in the Sun), 2016
Oil on paper mounted on canvasboard
9 x 18 in.
JL16201
The Lunar Chorine, 2015
Oil on canvas
18 x 14 in.
JL16200
42nd street (Tesserae), 2015
Oil on canvas
24 x 32 inches
JL15487
John Lees was born in 1943 in Denville, NJ. He received his BFA and MFA from the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, CA. He has been exhibiting in New York since 1977. He lives and works in upstate New York. Lees is the recipient of numerous awards and grants, including the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Hassam, Speicher, Betts, and Symons Purchase Fund Award; the Francis J. Greenburger Award; the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Grant; and the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Grant.
His work can be found in a host of public institutions, most notably the Detroit Institute of Art, Detroit, MI; the Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, MA; The Kemper Collection, Kansas City, MO; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; and The New Museum, New York, NY.
To the Studio, a three-person exhibition at JJ Murphy Gallery in LES brings together paintings by Elisa Jensen, John Lees, and Liam Murphy-Torres, whose works collectively explore shared traditions of observation, light, and painterly practice. The title is inspired by a series of paintings by Frank Auerbach depicting a view of three artists’ studios, but also alludes to the New York Studio as an institution, tying them together. Both Jensen and Lees have been professors of Murphy-Torres at this historic institution.
“To the Studio,” features paintings by Elisa Jensen, John Lees, and Liam Murphy-Torres - three generations of artists associated with the New York Studio School. The exhibition will be open to the public from January 22 to February 21, 2026 with a reception on Wednesday, January 28, from 6 to 8 PM.
The exhibition incudes a selection of 17 pieces by John in conjunction with the work of his wife, Ruth.
To accompany the extension of Krazy Paradise though November 11th, John Lees will give an artist talk at Betty Cuningham Gallery on Saturday, November 4th at 12:00 pm.
John Lees’s oneiric landscapes and portraits are haunted. And not only by his acknowledged sources, Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Fauves like Rouault and Dufy, the precursors of Expressionism, the niche to which Lees is usually assigned. There are other ghosts, especially the mysterious landscapes of Samuel Palmer, themselves channels for the otherworldly works of William Blake. So, Lees is a strange kind of Romantic who finds himself painting in the twenty-first century.
A journey back across the skinny park brings me to Rivington Street, where Betty Cuningham Gallery is opening Krazy Paradise, an exhibition of recent work by John Lees. The oil paintings in this show are textured and unpretentious, imbued with a self-aware sense of humor. Lees doesn’t need the pathos other painters rely on to make his paintings visually profound.
"Painting and Meaning” featuring Eric Elliott, Zoey Frank, John Lees, Ying Li, Ruth Miller Forge, Clintel Steed, and facilitated by Jordan Wolfson, co-presented by Sugarlft Gallery and the New York Studio School, recorded on Wednesday, September 20, 2023.
Despite the fact that Lees works on paintings for as long as 30 years, they don’t appear overly precious. Instead, they seem human and vulnerable.
The Critics Notebook
By Andrew Shea
"Looking as if they’ve been painted up, sanded down, rubbed into, scraped away, tossed about, kicked around, and painted up again (and again and again), John Lees’s paintings, on view now at Betty Cuningham Gallery on the Lower East Side, are unkempt to the extreme. Their surfaces often rudely emerge into our physical space in low relief—see the near lip of an old-timey, free-standing bathtub, worked on from 1972 to 2010. It’s an effect that could easily descend into gimmick, but in Lees’s hands the brunt physicality also leaves room for delicate vision."
"John Lees’s All-Too-Human Paintings"
By John Yau
"By repeatedly returning to the same motif, Lees attempts the impossible, which is to freeze a particular object, individual, or moment in time."
In 1906 the critic Philip Hale remarked that he perceived a “fine insanity” in the work of Marsden Hartley, by which the artist took him to mean “a strong insistence upon the personal interpretations of the subjects chosen.” While Marsden might not be the first name to come to mind in viewing John Lees’ fourth solo exhibition at Betty Cuningham, Lees does harness his unequivocal mastery of paint into building images that speak of a similar, profound commitment to inner reflection.
Like the fabled American nineteenth-century artist Albert Pinkham Ryder, John Lees often works on his paintings for years, even decades, overlaying the canvases with what the French call “couches” of pigment (a word relating to “couch” in English—to lay down on). And he modifies, eliminates, paints over, peers at, thinks about, thinks more about, changes again, scrapes, puts aside (facing the wall), looks at yet again, adds more paint to, further edits, revises, and so encrusts the surfaces in a richly heavy and sometimes bumpy or gravelly, sometimes willfully crude, scumbled textures that may glow with colors both luxuriant and subtle from beneath. So these paintings age with him.
John Lees’s hallmark obsession with his interior life is legendary. The twenty-seven works on view at Betty Cuningham Gallery are concrete examples of his introspective style; they are ponderous, blisteringly intense, and hyperspecific. While his obsessiveness may fuel a rich interior life, it has clearly come at a cost. He seems to have little time or energy left over to pursue that elusive possession of the comfortably successful artist: recognition.
In early November, clocks around here seem to slow down as fallen aspen leaves are plastered to the concrete and light snowfall hints at the winter to come. The empty streets do not profess a dearth of cultural offerings, though.
The Ah Haa School for the Arts has several offerings during the next month: most notably, the Telluride Painting School’s The Central Image Still Life, taught by acclaimed artist and professor John Lees over the course of two weeks, from Nov. 9-20.
