A Figure In The Shadows

Jongho Lee and Indiana Hoover

PUTTY'S CORONATION is pleased to announce the opening of A Figure In The Shadows, a group exhibition featuring the work of Jongho Lee and Indiana Hoover at Putty’s Coronation on 483 17th St, 4B, Brooklyn, NY 11215 from October 21st - November 11th, 2023.

A Figure In The Shadows presents new paintings and drawings by Indiana Hoover and sculptures by Jongho Lee. In each artist's work, objects and images are under constant scrutiny, being reworked and revised. This process of repetition and transformation, mirroring and reversal is less about progress or completion than discovery. In both artist’s practices is an inquiry into the ways in which artworks contain and convey both contingent and fragmentary information.

For A Figure In The Shadows, Hoover exhibits over fifteen portraits made in the past year. With each face generated from the artist’s imagination, characters begin to make recurring appearances in the artist’s oeuvre, their compositions being reworked and rewritten. For the series Untitled(female portrait) Hoover revisits a portrait of a woman, head three-quarters turned, her gaze on the viewer. With each successive picture, and each laboriously placed mark, the painted surface is re-imagined, providing evidence of an uncompromising dissatisfaction with pictorial unity, less focused on creating a specific outcome, than with the artist's internal search to create a satisfactory image.

In the center of the gallery, Jongho Lee presents two free standing sculptures, sourcing his materials from items found on the streets near his studio in Jersey City. In Painted Sculpture, Lee manipulates a found piece of driftwood and discarded picture frame to create a figurative form. In Time's Teeth a rusted metal container holds old white picket fences, all held up by a steel frame and wooden base. The found materials in both as a means to explore the latent legacies of lost ideas, the memories that physical objects preserve and the often-unseen relationships between material things.

With each gesture in A Figure In The Shadows, both artists reference subjective history. Their work points self-referentially to the process of its own creation, while expanding outwards to interrogate how we make meaning of worldly experience.

Jongho Lee was born in Seoul, South Korea, and received a BFA and an MA from NYU. He is the recipient of the Pilchuck Scholarship in 2018 in addition to being the resident artist assistant at Pilchuck Glass School. He lives and works in New Jersey.

Indiana Hoover was born in New York City in 1987, and has studied drawing and painting at the Art Students League, Laguna College of Art & Design, and Cuny Hunter. He lives and works in South Brooklyn.