Lucy Bull
Photo: Gillian Steiner
Lucy Bull
United States born 1990
Level 2
NGV International
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PROJECT
Lucy Bull’s visceral and kinetic style of abstract painting comprises large-scale multi-layered compositions that draw on a range of art historical styles and movements, from Impressionism to Surrealism, and employ an equally diverse set of techniques, from automatism – a process of creating linework by accessing the unconscious mind – to grattage – a process of scratching away fresh paint to create texture and line. The immersive scale of her canvases invites the viewer to become lost in their sensory qualities, evoking the Surrealist tendency to engage with the subconscious. Of her process, Bull has said ‘when I’m making them, there’s this dance between subconscious, intuitive, spontaneous mark making, and then more reflective, meditative honing [sic] in, a pulling out of different sensations or associations’.
ABOUT
Working largely intuitively, Lucy Bull creates colourful abstract paintings with repeated gestural marks and layers of paint to evoke an emotional response from the viewer. Bull has recently exhibited at Pond Society (with Guo Fengyi), Shanghai, 2021; David Kordansky Gallery, New York, 2022, and Los Angeles, 2021; and Human Resources, Los Angeles, 2019. Recent group exhibitions include 13 Women: Variation I, Orange County Museum of Art, 2022; Abstract Vocabularies: Selections from the Collection, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, 2021; and Present Generations: Creating the Scantland Collection of the Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus Museum of Art, 2021. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Geneva; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Long Museum West Bund, Shanghai; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
Purchased with funds donated by July Cao, 2022