Eleanor Harwood Gallery is pleased to present I Fucking Love You, our first solo show with Lee Materazzi.

Materazzi works using medium format photography to document her own performance, installation, and sculpture. Her practice is hybridized, somewhere between performance and formal portraiture. Her use of compositions, color and form almost trick us into not seeing the conceptual content of her work. The seductive bright colors ease us into looking, and then the images point us to the deeper considerations within her work. The bending, the pretzeling of motherhood, and womanhood is so much what these works are about.

Her work has some of the uninhibitedness of Karen Finley’s performative works from the 90’s, but with lots of the painterly, structural and formal qualities of abstract expressionism, with a dose of minimalist pop when it comes to color palettes and forms. She moves easily into the territory of third wave feminism, a bit punk, a bit sexy, and all out there and unapologetic. It’s beautiful work, but also has a sharp edge to it.

Using everyday objects and materials she covers herself in masking tape, or paints her entire body making herself match the other objects in the image. She fold her body through a chair in Bent Over Chair, tapes herself to a wall in Duct Taped to the Wall. As she folds and paints herself into what sometimes feels uncomfortable and masochistic, is she still loving herself, loving her body as a generative tool, and as a medium? Her title, I Fucking Love You addresses this in part. The profound implication, that a woman whose work uses her own body, and never really points to another, aside from the funny inclusions of the remnant action of her children putting objects on her body (googly eyes all over her nude back) and maybe the fluids of conception, might be saying I Fucking Love You to herself is so delicious as an idea. Is she telling us she fucking loves herself?!

Or is she pointing to the security of a relationship where that can be said to another and that one still feels it, a sentiment so intense one needs to swear, because the feelings are that explosive, or alternatively maybe it’s a statement to herself. Self love, I Fucking Love You, said to the mirror. She also certainly loves her kids, whose near invisible roles in the art-making are recorded with permanence. She points to so many ways to love and to be so fierce and unreserved. Materazzi brings us there and points to the space that we may be numbed-out to. Have we said I Fucking Love You lately, to another or to ourselves?

Lee Materazzi is a contemporary artist from Miami, FL now living in San Francisco, CA. In 2005 she received her BFA in sculpture from Central Saint Martins in London. Her work challenges the line between performance, installation, and sculpture which she materializes and documents through medium format photography. The subject matter in Materazzi’s work is inspired by the mundane and materials that are directly on hand — a folding chair or a role of tape. She uses her body alongside these materials and experiments of color, composition and balance. The end result creates a sculptural and performative scene for the camera that makes us think about social roles, routines, and gestures that are frequently overlooked within our everyday lives. Her work has been shown internationally and is a part of numerous public art collections including the The Perez Art Museum (formally MAM), The Margulies Collection at the Warehouse and The Scholl Collection at World Class Boxing. Materazzi has been commissioned to create work for The Sagamore Hotel Collection and her work has been featured by Sia on Dancing with The Stars.