Austin Lee

Mixed Reality

Eighteen is pleased to present 

Mixed Reality
A solo exhibition by Austin Lee
June 12 – August 8, 2026

Opening reception: June 12, 16.00 - 21.00

In Austin Lee's solo exhibition Mixed Reality — his first in Denmark, we enter a contemplative plane somewhere between the mundane and the uncanny: the real virtual reality, very close, yet slightly peripheral. His new paintings and sculptures explore the human condition, probe the edges of presence and perception, as Lee employs digital tools and strategies to review and expand the ancient language of painting. Here, consciousness dances with the unconscious, and the familiar winks back at you in the mirror.

"I suppose these paintings are an attempt at a genuine expression of myself and my life. Instead of trying to share emotions using new aesthetics created with computer software like I've done in the past, I've used digital tools to express the simple beautiful parts of my lived experience." Austin Lee writes in his studio notes.

Lee creates sketches for his paintings by building virtual 3D models in the computer program Blender, where he can stage and light a scene or tableau, much like a contemporary update of a classic still life or painters table. For the sculptures he uses motion capture to record gestures and movements of his own body, which becomes the point of departure for their physical form. The use of motion capture is comparable to the way artists have used mirrors in the creation of paintings and sculptures for centuries.

As Merleau-Ponty states in his beautiful essay on painting "Eye and Mind" (L'Œil et l'Esprit), from 1961:

”Like all other technical objects, such as tools and signs, the mirror has sprung up along the open circuit running from the seeing body to the visible body. Every technique is a 'technique of the body.' The technique figures and amplifies the metaphysical structure of our flesh. […] The painter 'takes his body with him,' says Valéry. Indeed, we cannot imagine how a mind could paint. It is by lending his body to the world that the artist changes the world into paintings.”

And so Austin Lee brings his body and experience into these works of art that shimmer, dance and breathe. The poetic everyday scenes depict a couple reading together at a large green table, a white vase erupting in a firework of flowers. Reading Together (20269 is a vibrant painting that radiates the joy of doing exactly what the title states. Sitting(2026) a self-portrait of the artist in a classic pose, seated in a chair, adjacent to a small table with a vase of flowers, in a state of contemplation. The tableau has a meditative quality, and a sense of disintegration of subject and object, painter, experience, the seer and the seen.. A quiet radical motif these days, the scene, rendered in a deep golden orange hue, has a transcendental quality — perplexing in its affirmed simplicity. Impermanence embraced. Existence is not a linear, goal-oriented discipline, and in other motifs the wonderful, weird and uncanny arise and calmly engulf the viewer. A horse, in a familiar open landscape, catches its own reflection in a pond — or portal? Reflecting Horse, 2026 — it appears to be pondering, inviting us to reflect with it, asking us the exestential enigma: what it is like to be a horse?

Austin Lee (b. 1983, Las Vegas, USA) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York, USA. Lee holds an MFA in Painting from Yale School of Art, Connecticut, USA. Recent selected solo exhibitions include: Divine Fool, Carl Kostyál, London, England, 2024, Psychomachia, Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles, USA, 2024, Passing Time, LOTTE Museum of Art, Seoul, South Korea, 2023, Good Impressions, Pace Prints, New York, USA, 2023, Double-Rendering, curated by Ho Won Kim, Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University, New York, USA, 2023 and Human Nature, M WOODS Museum, Beijing, China, 2022.

Mixed Reality is Austin Lee’s first solo exhibition with Eighteen Gallery. If you are unfamiliar with Lee's artistic output, we highly recommend taking a virtual art hike through 20 years of his avant-garde practice here: https://timemachine.austinleedotnet.workers.dev 

Text by Jesper Elg