MISAKO & ROSEN is pleased to announce our second solo exhibition with Margaret Lee – (as) hard as (it) gets. Margaret Lee was born (1980) and presently lives and works in New York.

As hard as it gets, holding on can get you to the other side of a situation. Specific attachments can be contested as can the sides but the intimacies found beyond self-disclosure require fidelity. Practical work grounds the line. Relationality ensures transference. Push and pull won’t let you down.

The paintings in Margaret Lee’s second exhibition at Misako & Rosen Gallery, are hung in pairs. Identically sized, these pairings share markings that should be read as upper barriers while the gestural activity below as varying degrees of push back. Hung in close proximity, the paintings show a relationality if not a semblance, as if one is emulating the other with the difference being one appears shakier than the other. The side-by-side hanging of these paintings would warrant a one-to-one comparison if not for the presence of wall sculptures wedged in between. Acting as intermediary links and concrete forms that ground the adjacent abstractions, these works are a return to the artist’s earliest sculpture making practice — the transformation of coarse materials to highly finished objects. Previous sculptural works idealised representational fidelity whereas these works are stripped to their barest form and mirror back the restrained palette of the paintings. Miscellaneous nails and screws break the highly polished surfaces, adding dimensionality to an otherwise two-dimensional installation. How one comes to view the relationship between these six paintings and three wall sculptures might depend on one’s own relationship to avoidance or attachment and understanding of how lines are drawn.