Austin Lee’s haunting soft-focus paintings are what I imagine my nightmares would look like if rendered in claymation and run through an AI algorithm. The artist’s digital/analog hybrids are creepy—a good kind of creepy, my kind of creepy. In the video Starers (2024), three long-necked creatures gaze at the viewer. The standout works are the video and sculpture. In the center of the gallery lies Blue Fountain (2022-24), a blue figure splayed on his back, its head—impossibly flipped and reversed —spews water from its mouth. The hologram Artist Head Crying Animation (Fan Video) (2024) is giving peak uncanny valley. This exhibition will get under the viewer’s skin and stay there. It cannot be unseen.

Austin Lee: Psychomachia
Jeffrey Deitch
7000 Santa Monica Blvd.,
Los Angeles, CA 90038
On view through October 26, 2024