Contemporary by Angela Li is proud to present Eugene Lemay’s first solo exhibition in Hong Kong – Faded Memories – a series of large scaled landscape artworks. The idea of dark, abstract landscape originated from Lemay’s night navigating experience near his mother’s hometown.
Eugene Lemay’s elegiac artworks originate from his service as sergeant in the 1982 Lebanon War. His signature creations, typically produced as large-scale inkjet prints on canvas, present dark abstractions of landscapes, sky, or encrypted text from unsent letters written by his fellow soldiers and offer a profound meditation on loss, life, and war.
“The works of Eugene Lemay present viewers with a string of somber visual riddles,” says American art critic Richard Vine. In fact, we all have our own answers to Lemay’s riddles, because we all, at one point or another, must have felt what Lemay felt—anxiety, uncertainty, shock, and much more—even if we have not had the same night-navigating experience like he did before.
Born in 1960, Lemayis a self-taught American artist of Lebanese, Syrian, and French-Canadian descent. His family converted to Judaism and moved to Israel in 1973. Lemay moved to New York City in 1984. He has exhibited extensively throughout the United States, Europe and Israel.