Jivan Lee, West from 150 at Noon (diptych detail), 2023, oil on panel, 48 x 96 in.

Jivan Lee has become a leading figure in contemporary landscape painting known for his powerful visceral engagement with his natural environs mirrored by his highly physical approach to surface and an intense plein air painting process.

A sense of place is paramount in Jivan Lee’s paintings of the landscape in and around Valdez, New Mexico. It’s this place, with a population of less than 500, whose wilds encroach on the half-hidden traces of human habitation—distant houses, tended fields, a glimpse of a curving road—with the drama of a winter storm or the peace of a quiet summer day – that capture the protean nature and ephemerality of this region of the Southwest and an incongruity: its inhospitable beauty reflected in this new body of Lee’s paintings.