Tim Lee has donated a film installation to the Sammlung Goetz

We are pleased to announce the donation of a work by Tim Lee to the Sammlung Goetz. The piece is the artist’s 16 mm film installation Untitled (Light-Space-Module, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, 1928-30), which was created in 2007 and is part of a larger, cross-genre group of works by the Korean Canadian artist.

Tim Lee, who was born in Seoul in 1975 and lives in Vancouver, created a humorous yet complex, multimedia and technically sophisticated installation using his photographs, videos, installations and sculptures. Like Rodney Graham and Jeff Wall, Lee studied at the renowned British Columbia University in Canada, which trained its students extensively in art theory and visual science. These teachings are reflected in Lee’s artistic work, which - despite its multi-layered references, levels of meaning and reflection - does not exhaust itself in theoretical discourses but is also aesthetically compelling. Lee’s work combines his interest in music, film, science and popular culture. He is about a great fan of musicians and bands like Public Enemy, Neil Young, Glenn Gould and Johann Sebastian Bach, athletes like Ted Williams and Bobby Orr, comedians like Steve Martin and the Marx Brothers, as well as visual artists like Bruce Naumann, Dan Graham and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.

A central multi-layered work in Lee’s oeuvre is his film installation Untitled (Light-Space-Module, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, 1928-30). The work consists of a 16 mm film projector, which the artist converted into a large sculpture. A 16 mm film loop is guided over various reels of a constructivist-like structure before it reaches the projector. The image to be projected is transferred from the lens via two mirrors onto a black-framed rear projection surface made of glass, which is mounted on the film projector. The projection is an upside-down image of a rotating office chair accompanied by flashes of light. With this work, Tim Lee makes a humorous reference to the light space modulator designed by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. With this modulator, in the 1920s, the universal artist and Bauhaus teacher designed a complicated apparatus as a way of demonstrating light and movement phenomena. Lee picks up on Moholy-Nagy’s idea and develops it further using film technology.

The Sammlung Goetz owns a larger series by the artist, created in 2007, which includes photography, video, sculpture and paper works. With the film installation Untitled (Light-Space-Module, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, 1928-30), the collection now also includes one of Lee’s central works. We thank the artist for his generosity and the Rüdiger Schöttle Gallery, which made this donation to the Sammlung Goetz possible.