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拍品专文
“It’s always like I’m building chaos, then I have to find my way back.” Lucy Bull
Lucy Bull’s monumental A New Dew resonates with vibrant color, exciting a bacchanalia of kaleidoscopic psychedelia to thrill the senses. Hypnotic in both its chromatic exuberance and technical brilliance, Bull presents a newly-invented visual language, revolutionizing the grammar of abstraction for the contemporary era. Building on the legacy of contemporary abstraction, the bright fluorescence of the yellow pigments in the upper register contrasted with areas of blue and red similarly recall Gerhard Richter’s Abstraktes Bilds, particularly from the early 1990s.
In fact, A New Dew compares to Richter’s famous abstract series in more ways than just visually—Bull’s innovative painterly technique recalls the German artist’s radical wielding of squeegee and spatula. Bull describes her painstaking, months-long process “like I’m building chaos, then I have to find my way back” (L. Bull, quoted in Taylor Dafoe, “Collectors stampeding to Lucy Bull’s ‘visionary’ abstractions,” The Art Newspaper, 17 May 2024, online). Through years of practiced experimentation, the artist discovered a novel, full-bodied brushstroke, allowing her to dab, twist and scrape the paint across the surface. Each manipulation of pigment clarifies her swirls of color into forms that threaten to resolve into recognizability before dissolving back into the composition’s ordered chaos. Bull pushes her paint brush to the extreme, eventually losing all bristles from the instrument; with the now-naked metal instrument, she then scrapes away built up layers to alchemize her work into its final illusory form reminiscent of the hypnotizing reflective pools of Claude Monet.
Bull approaches the canvas with resolute determination, fully immersing herself into her practice. Her studio exists within her lofted two-story home, muddying boundaries between the personal and the professional. Bull describes her intense focus, noting how she often works late into the night: “It’s this magical period of time where you’re completely alone, and it feels almost like time stolen from sleep. There’s something really empowering about not being asleep. It seems almost wrong that you’re finishing a painting at that hour. Maybe it's also an easier time to get lost” (L. Bull, quoted in Kat Herriman, “Artist Lucy Bull Brings Her Color Vision to David Kordansky Gallery, L’Officiel, 18 October 2021, online). Her obsessive practice reminds of Yayoi Kusama’s mediative endurance producing her abstract Infinity Nets, the Japanese artist also furiously working into the early morning hours. Bull refuses to paint in the presence of anyone else, believing that her idiosyncratic style can only emerge when she is able to completely “unhinge.” After months of additions and subtractions, she finally decides when a canvas is finished “when I get lost, when I lose track of how I made them” (L. Bull, quoted in op cit.).
A singular voice in contemporary abstract painting, Lucy Bull’s dynamic practice explores both the formal and experimental elements of her medium. A New Dew demonstrates the fruits of her investigations, her choreographic gestures erupting into colorful fields of pictorial energy. Much feted, Bull’s oeuvre has accessioned into the permanent collections of many prestigious institutions, including Baltimore Museum of Art; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; MAMCO, Geneva; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Long Museum West Bund, Shanghai; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; and Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Walth Massachusetts. The artist’s first museum survey in the United States, “Lucy Bull: The Garden of Forking Paths,” opens at ICA Miami this December.
Lucy Bull’s monumental A New Dew resonates with vibrant color, exciting a bacchanalia of kaleidoscopic psychedelia to thrill the senses. Hypnotic in both its chromatic exuberance and technical brilliance, Bull presents a newly-invented visual language, revolutionizing the grammar of abstraction for the contemporary era. Building on the legacy of contemporary abstraction, the bright fluorescence of the yellow pigments in the upper register contrasted with areas of blue and red similarly recall Gerhard Richter’s Abstraktes Bilds, particularly from the early 1990s.
In fact, A New Dew compares to Richter’s famous abstract series in more ways than just visually—Bull’s innovative painterly technique recalls the German artist’s radical wielding of squeegee and spatula. Bull describes her painstaking, months-long process “like I’m building chaos, then I have to find my way back” (L. Bull, quoted in Taylor Dafoe, “Collectors stampeding to Lucy Bull’s ‘visionary’ abstractions,” The Art Newspaper, 17 May 2024, online). Through years of practiced experimentation, the artist discovered a novel, full-bodied brushstroke, allowing her to dab, twist and scrape the paint across the surface. Each manipulation of pigment clarifies her swirls of color into forms that threaten to resolve into recognizability before dissolving back into the composition’s ordered chaos. Bull pushes her paint brush to the extreme, eventually losing all bristles from the instrument; with the now-naked metal instrument, she then scrapes away built up layers to alchemize her work into its final illusory form reminiscent of the hypnotizing reflective pools of Claude Monet.
Bull approaches the canvas with resolute determination, fully immersing herself into her practice. Her studio exists within her lofted two-story home, muddying boundaries between the personal and the professional. Bull describes her intense focus, noting how she often works late into the night: “It’s this magical period of time where you’re completely alone, and it feels almost like time stolen from sleep. There’s something really empowering about not being asleep. It seems almost wrong that you’re finishing a painting at that hour. Maybe it's also an easier time to get lost” (L. Bull, quoted in Kat Herriman, “Artist Lucy Bull Brings Her Color Vision to David Kordansky Gallery, L’Officiel, 18 October 2021, online). Her obsessive practice reminds of Yayoi Kusama’s mediative endurance producing her abstract Infinity Nets, the Japanese artist also furiously working into the early morning hours. Bull refuses to paint in the presence of anyone else, believing that her idiosyncratic style can only emerge when she is able to completely “unhinge.” After months of additions and subtractions, she finally decides when a canvas is finished “when I get lost, when I lose track of how I made them” (L. Bull, quoted in op cit.).
A singular voice in contemporary abstract painting, Lucy Bull’s dynamic practice explores both the formal and experimental elements of her medium. A New Dew demonstrates the fruits of her investigations, her choreographic gestures erupting into colorful fields of pictorial energy. Much feted, Bull’s oeuvre has accessioned into the permanent collections of many prestigious institutions, including Baltimore Museum of Art; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; MAMCO, Geneva; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Long Museum West Bund, Shanghai; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; and Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Walth Massachusetts. The artist’s first museum survey in the United States, “Lucy Bull: The Garden of Forking Paths,” opens at ICA Miami this December.