Adam Lee’s painting and drawing practice ties together narratives of memory, imagination and transcendence. Through his works on canvas and paper, Lee builds worlds where allegory and atmosphere coalesce to suggest a highly personal outlook informed by collective folklore and legend. His work references a wide range of sources including historical and family photographs, spiritual narratives, natural history, and contemporary music, film and literature to investigate aspects of the human condition in relation to ideas of temporal and supernatural worlds. These explorations find their physical manifestation in Lee’s well-honed individual style, characterised by moody landscapes and a contemporary take on tenebrism.

Lee has exhibited throughout Australia and internationally. He was recently invited to participate in the 2021 Kyneton Contemporary Art Triennial, Holding the Circle. He has been a finalist in The Arthur Guy Memorial Painting Prize (2021, 2019, 2015, 2013); The Geelong Contemporary Art Prize (2014); National Works on Paper Prize exhibition (2014); The Churchie National Emerging Artist Award (2012, 2011); The Redlands Westpac Art Prize (2010); The Rick Amor Drawing Prize (2010); and The Sir John Sulman Prize (2010, 2006). His works are represented in public and private collections in Australia and internationally.

‍Adam Lee’s vast landscapes aren’t really landscapes, just as his portraits aren’t really portraits. It might seem a trite proposition, but it’s one worth making. Describing Lee’s paintings purely in terms of representation – either straight or stylised – is missing the point. At once lithe and laboured, these lush, dense and fluid scenes, vistas, orbs and figures belong to a wider, more allegorical and atmospheric kind. They are memories and imaginings, ancient and enveloping.
‍— Dan Rule, September 2012

The world building which Adam Lee has undertaken over much of his artistic oeuvre seems to have perpetuated its own fictionalised reality, from the time of the cradle of civilisation, in a Mesopotamian oasis 300 B.C.-cum-third century A.D. land that exists somewhere between two ‘Greats’. That of Alexander the Great, King of the Greek Empire, and Anthony the Great, Christian Saint and hermit leader of The Desert Fathers. Though in Lee’s fiction, both Greats inhabit the same time: the Christian hermits, and the cities and structures before Christianity, rest in this world of fluid colourful motion. The Mesopotamian Tower of Babel, with its conjectural origin as the Etemenaki ziggurat of Babylon, stands in this world with a ‘purple haze’ sky, whilst contemplative hermits sit in caves thinking radioactive thoughts.
— Jack Willet, February 2015

Adam Lee is represented by STATION.