Lennie Lee
| Lennie Lee | |
|---|---|
| Born | Johannesburg, South Africa |
| Education | Christ Church, Oxford |
| Known for | painting, performance art, video art, photography and installation art |
| Website | www |
| Patron(s) | David Roberts |
Lennie Lee (born 4 March 1958) is a South African conceptual artist who lives and works in London.
Lennie Lee is a British artist born in Johannesburg, South Africa. He moved to the UK in 1960. He was educated at Dulwich college in London before winning a scholarship to study philosophy at Christ Church, Oxford.
In 1983 he took up painting. Soon after, he moved to East London where he became interested in the urban dereliction left over from the Second World War. In 1984 he occupied several disused buildings and, together with a number of artists including South African painter, Beezy Bailey, he began to make site-specificinstallations using found material.
From the mid-1980s he joined various underground art collectives including the ARC group, a London-based collective of international artists, influenced by Kurt Schwitters, who specialized in building site-specific installation art. From 1987 to 1991 he worked together with the ARC group until it was finally disbanded in November 1991 in Budapest.
After the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, Lee was offered a number of exhibitions in East and West Berlin. While working on a series of outdoor sculptural installations in the summer of 1990, he was invited to work at the Kunst Haus Tacheles in Berlin, where he made contact with the thriving Berlin underground scene. On his return to London in the winter of 1990 he began to make a series of performances, mostly on the theme of taboo, the first of which took place at the ARC in London's Balls Pond Road. Through this, Lee was introduced to members of the KULE group, a radical theatre collective based in Berlin who invited him to come and stay in August Strasse 10 in the winter of 1990. There, together with performance artist Nils Duemcke, he set up a weekly cabaret. In the same year he painted large-scale banners for the Mutoid Waste Company.
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