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Lee Price, a figurative hyperrealist painter from New York who has been working on the relationship between woman and food for over twenty years is surely an artist to watch closely on the Contemporary art market in the coming years.

Wealthy collectors are mad of Warhol, Jeff Koons, Gerhard Richter and other famous artists in this partcular domain but Lee Price is surely the one artist to bank on as she surpasses them in terms of talent and originality.

When she started to paint at college she was primarily interested in figures in environments and created large-size paintings of women in interiors with food placed in her scenes without being conscious of their meanings at that time.

Working with photographs with a view to creating fairy tale atmospheres she failed for a long time to arrange the scenes she wanted to paint until she finally managed to grasp their significance.

Drawn by figurative realism, she strove to make personal intimate paintings in representing herself eating food, which is seen as a kind of compulsion either in bed or in a bathtub both regarded as spaces of solitude to emphasize the secrecy of compulsive behavior, as she once said in an interview with the otherjournal.com.

Using photos taken from the top of a ladder, Lee Price in fact looks down at herself in the act of the compulsive behavior, fully aware of what she does but unable to stop like a drug-addict.

Her work is in fact all about food but also the qualities it does not have in trying to to convey, as she stressed, a feeling of loss of control showing therefore how our compulsiveness distracts us from being present. She also focuses on the absurdity of this type of behavior and the way we prolong and intensify our suffering while reflecting shame in such actions especially as consuming food in bed or in a bathtub seems somewhat taboo.

Tackling also the problem of women trying to remain thin in censoring their appetite, Lee Price has shown in her works their attempt to overcome the repression of desire by abandoning themselves to inconspicuous consumption.

Pricewise, the difference between a painting by Lee Price tagged at about 35,000 dollars and a work by Andy Warhol sold at 40 million and over is rather enormous simply because collectors alas think much more about profits than aesthetics but real connoisseurs will surely be able to have second thoughts one of these days.