Lucy Bull — Born 1990, New York. Lives and works in Los Angeles, California. Represented by High Art, Paris; and David Kordansky Gallery, New York/Los Angeles.

 

For Lucy Bull, the content is inseparable from the process. Bull makes optically charged paintings, which drag the viewer into a cinematic trance. Some have likened her canvases to songs, in the way that they produce durational experiences as the eye is drawn over the kinetic optics of the 2-D surface. Music is a recurring inspiration for Bull, but it’s the automatic brushwork of the Surrealists and their filmmaking peers that have loomed large in her thinking recently, in addition to her forever muse: Hollywood and the weird mythologies that spin outwards from it. Her cinephilia bleeds not only into her relationship with her chosen hometown, but also into her compositions, which purposefully drag out time to allow fantasy the head start it needs to catch the tail of the truth. “Time is everything,” Bull says bluntly. “I’ve always been jealous of filmmakers, who expect no one will leave the theater. When I’m painting, I’m always thinking about creating the same kind of psychic space that a movie does because

I think it’s better when you are invited to feel your way through an experience. It’s through indulging our unconscious that we find reality.” In addition to the space she makes in her paintings, Bull is known for her table-top exhibition space “From the Desk of Lucy Bull” where she regularly curates exhibitions and performances. 

 

Bull received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2012. She has had solo and two-person exhibitions at David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles; High Art, Arles & Paris, France; Smart Objects, Los Angeles; Queens, Los Angeles; Human Resources, Los Angeles; and Mother Culture, among others. Recent group exhibitions include: Present Generations: Creating the Scantland Collection of the Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio; Life Still, CLEARING, New York; and I Want to Eat the Sunset. We’re Talking About the Cosmos, Even. And Love, I Guess, Almine Rech, New York. Her work is in the permanent collections of MAMCO Geneva; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; Dallas Museum of Art; and Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami.