September 18 - November 8, 2025
Opening Reception:
Thursday, September 18. 6-8 pm
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.
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"I don't plan my paintings in the traditional sense, in that I don't sketch or make studies. Instead, I work from what I've described before as a cabinet of curiosities and stored images and moods. Sometimes I think my brain works like a little pop-up movie theater ... I can feel the presence of characters waiting to come out."
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"It wasn't until the 2020 lockdown, when the world had really slowed down in this surreal, suspended way, that something inside me opened. All of the images, figures, and scenes that had been buried for years just started coming to the surface. I started painting constantly when I wasn't at work. At first, it was something I did at the kitchen table in the early mornings or after work-just for myself."
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"I've worked as a mental health nurse for many years. During the pandemic, I was on a team that treated people in acute psychosis, which was often intense and difficult. People sometimes assume that my work is directly influenced by that job, but to me they live in separate parts of my brain. Painting is not an outlet or reflection of my clinical work. If anything, it's a way to shift into another mode entirely—a place that's imaginative, personal, and self-generating."
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"I think some paintings can seem quite sweet and innocent on the surface but hold something darker underneath. Lots of the paintings take place in bedrooms and living rooms. They act as small stages where tensions can play out between girlhood and womanhood, adulthood and care, cruelty, humor, and violence."
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Shopping with Mother in Monster Masks, 2023Acrylic on paper11 3/4 x 8 1/4 in. (29.8 x 21 cm)(STL 16)$ 3,000 -
Tunnel of Love, 2023Acrylic on canvas panel mounted on wood13 3/4 x 11 in. (34.9 x 27.9 cm)(STL 12)$ 4,000
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How Have You Been?, 2024Acrylic on canvas panel mounted on wood11 3/4 x 8 1/4 in. (29.8 x 21 cm)(STL 42)$ 3,000
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Concurrently on view in Gallery One:
Morris Hirshfield: Brooklyn Tailor
Visit the online viewing room here.
