What Big Eyes You Have

Ricco/Maresca is proud to present Sarah Theresa Lee's debut with the gallery, revolving around a new body of work created over the past year. Lee conjures a world both familiar and uncanny, where the intimacy of domestic interiors gives way to something stranger and charged. Her settings feel lived-in, but beneath their comforts unfolds a theater of psychological suspense. Figures are masked, doubled, disembodied, their presence cracked and unstable; curtains never quite fall. What begins as echoes of childhood and grandmotherly parlors mutates into stages of erotic tension, surreal ritual, and macabre humor. Girls and women hover between mischief and menace, costume and confession, while men appear only as grotesque surrogates: mannequin, puppet, prowling beast. Children sharpen rather than soften the scenes--miniature adults, alert-eyed, already drawn into knowing games. Lee's visual language draws on pulp illustration, mid-century horror cinema, and echoes of Carrington and Fini. Her motifs--detached heads, animal familiars, cosmetics, soap, milk, cigarettes, wall clocks--accumulate like incantations. Faces and masks swap and fracture, suggesting unstable selves, femininity as possession, and the double edge of the gaze. The exhibition title, _What Big Eyes You Have_, encapsulates the work's magnetism: the thrill and dread of looking too closely. Lee's paintings seduce, disturb, and refuse to let you look away. Sarah Theresa Lee (b. 1980) is a self-taught Irish artist based in London. She works as a psychiatric nurse and devotes the rest of her time to painting. Her subjects appear as if conjured from the layered sediment of memory, ritual, and dream. Though she drew compulsively as a child, Lee was discouraged from pursuing art and abandoned it for years. She began painting seriously during the 2020 lockdown, when the world slowed and long-dormant images began to surface. Since then, she has made a daily practice of it--finding time in the early mornings and late evenings, often at her kitchen table, whenever she isn't working. A couple of years into this rhythm, her home flooded, and she was once again isolated--this time in a hotel room with Covid. In that suspended stretch, she created a series of paintings that marked a turning point in her practice: distilled, hallucinatory, and more assured. When she began sharing her work publicly, the response was immediate and affirming. Her process is intuitive and unscripted. She paints without preparatory sketches, guided by a mental archive she describes as a "cabinet" of images and scenes waiting to be retrieved. Her works resist categorization: unvarnished and uncanny, they speak a visual language that feels less learned than remembered. Though the imagery is often psychologically charged, Lee doesn't see it as connected to her work as a mental health nurse. During the pandemic, she was part of a team specializing in treating acute psychosis--working with patients in crisis by day, and painting by night to access a space shaped entirely by imagination. In recent years, her work has gained wide attention, appearing in exhibitions throughout the UK, Europe, and the U.S. Still, she paints as she always has: instinctively, privately, and on her own terms.

Visit

529 W 20th St, 3rd Floor

Chelsea, NY