Lee Ranaldo grew up in New York and studied painting before co-founding Sonic Youth with Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon in 1981 — the band that helped shape the sound of the New York avant-garde for thirty years. Throughout those years he kept drawing, writing and printmaking: music was the medium the public knew, but the visual practice never stopped.
At its centre are the Lost Highway Drawings: quick, improvisatory drawings Ranaldo has been making since his student days from the passenger seat of a moving car — the endless being-on-the-road of a touring musician, caught in lines. He also makes drypoint prints scratched into old vinyl records, graphic scores based on ambient sound, text works from his pocket notebooks, and performances with his wife, artist Leah Singer. In 2014 he already showed his road drawings in Ghent, at Jan Dhaese Gallery.
For (again) across the river (2025) at DeNode, curated by Hilde Van Canneyt, Ranaldo brought new work from his residency in Krems, Austria: larger-format Lost Highway drawings, early abstractions, rubber-stamped text works dedicated to the Canadian artist Greg Curnoe, graphic scores — and The Best Bicycle Bell in the World, bicycle bells mounted on Belgian cobblestones, the first step towards an homage to John Cage.
