Leelee Kimmel
Leelee Kimmel was born in New York in 1983, where she lives and works. Alongside her painting practice, Leelee Kimmel has also pursued a career as an actress. Leelee Kimmel is exhibiting for the first time at Reiffers Initiatives and is participating in the second exhibition of the Reiffers Initiatives collection entitled “The Living Room,” a meeting with the emerging French contemporary art scene.
Griffen, 208.3 × 284.5 × 3.8 cm. Acrylic on canvas.
Leelee Kimmel , 2018
View of the exhibition “The Living Room”
Leelee Kimmel , 2026
View of the exhibition “The Living Room”
Leelee Kimmel , 2026Biography
Leelee Kimmel’s works oscillate between controlled abstraction and spontaneous overflow. Populated with electrified organic forms, they unfold a vibrant biomorphism inherited from Surrealism. The pictorial material, applied with luxuriance like icing, evokes an almost regressive pleasure.
Without ever becoming explicit, resonances run through her paintings: from Joan Miró and André Masson to Cy Twombly, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Jonathan Lasker. An even more singular connection emerges with Philip Guston: at times, her abstractions revive the nervous line characteristic of the American painter.
Her compositions reveal a world that is both theatrical and unsettling, where life seems contaminated by metamorphosis itself: incandescent amoebae, trembling paramecia emerging from the depths of the sea, from space, or from an inner journey, flagella—an entire universe that is not without recalling the plates of Ernst Haeckel.