Featured Work IL LEE
  • 01
    IL LEE, BL-120, 2011, ballpoint pen on canvas, 82 x 117 inches (208.3 x 297.2 cm)
  • 02
    IL LEE, BK-1201, 2012, ballpoint pen on paper, 63 1/2 x 47 inches (161.3 x 119.4 cm)
  • 03
    IL LEE, BL-1201, 2012, ballpoint pen on paper
  • 04
    IL LEE, BL-115, 2008, ballpoint pen on paper
  • 05
    IL LEE, BL-094, 2008, ballpoint pen on canvas
  • 06
    IL LEE, BL-105, 2008, ballpoint pen on canvas
  • 07
    IL LEE: Ballpoint Abstractions at the San Jose Museum of Art, California, 2007.
  • 08
    IL LEE, Untitled 303, 2003, ballpoint pen on paper
  • 11
    IL LEE at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2010-2011.
  • 12
    IL LEE, RIW-1301, 2013, acrylic and oil on canvas
  • 13
    IL LEE, ITW-1203, 2012, acrylic and oil on canvas
  • 14
    IL LEE, IY-1201, 2012, acrylic and oil on canvas
  • 15
    IL LEE, BLW-1101, 2011, acrylic and oil on canvas
  • 16
    IL LEE, WBL-1202, 2012, acrylic and oil on canvas
  • 17
    IL LEE, RW-1207, 2012, acrylic and oil on canvas
  • 18
    IL LEE, WB-1206, 2012, acrylic and oil on canvas
  • 31
    IL LEE, SW-096, 2006, ballpoint pen on paper
  • 32
    IL LEE, SBK-093, 2009, ballpoint pen on paper
  • 33
    IL LEE, SBLBK-084, 2008, ballpoint pen on paper
  • 35
    IL LEE, SBK-085, 2008, ballpoint pen on paper
  • 35
    IL LEE, SBK-082, 2008, ballpoint pen on paper
  • 36
    IL LEE, SW-102, 2006, ballpoint pen on paper
  • 37
    IL LEE, SW-014, 2004, ballpoint pen on paper
  • 38
    IL LEE, SBK-092, 2009, ballpoint pen on paper

Recent Exhibition: IL LEE: New Work

IL LEE is best known for his pioneering work with ballpoint pen that he began more than 30 years ago and continues today. Lee’s recent oil on canvas work and new prints bring the viewer back to his early investigations of materials and process that began decades ago. Lee’s oeuvre offers a great breadth of approaches and media as he investigates drawing, the negative and its positive, line and form and of what is rendered and what is there but not rendered. Lee’s monolithic focus has created a universe at once cohesive and yet still expanding in all directions.

Critically acclaimed and widely exhibited, IL Lee’s oil on canvas work and his ballpoint pen work on paper were recently exhibited at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. IL Lee's innovative and historically grounded ballpoint pen works were the subject of a mid-career retrospective at the San Jose Museum of Art and solo exhibitions at the Queens Museum of Art, the Vilcek Foundation in New York, and the Crow Collection of Asian Art in Dallas, Texas. His work has been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, the Smithsonian Museum of Art and the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea.

His work is represented in major collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Leeum Samsung Museum of Art, San Jose Museum of Art, Vilcek Foundation and National Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul.

Large works by Il Lee are currently featured as part of Extreme Drawing in Ballpoint Pen Drawings Since 1950 at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, on view though August 25, 2013.