Upcoming | Lucy Bull: Venus World

From June 10th to August 13th 2023, Long Museum (West Bund) will present American artist Lucy Bull’s first solo exhibition Venus World, features her most recent 8 abstract paintings, one among them reaches nearly six meters, this is the first time the artist attempts such large scale diptych.

Lucy Bull was born in 1990 New York, her works encourage a playful encounter, in which the eye can wander naively across their surfaces and revel in the oscillations of color; in which the delicacy of forms, and contrasts in emotion can stimulate one's imagination and intellect. Within each work Bull crafts universes of drama — universes that follow their own laws and patterns, which appear as complete unto themselves but nevertheless ask to be explored, interrogated and felt. They recall in this sense the modernist project of art for art's sake.

Lucy Bull, Gloam (details), 2023, oil on linen, 121.9 x 91.4 x 2.9 cm. Courtesy the artist and David Kordansky Gallery

Bull’s sense of color derives not from life but from the possibilities of her paint, from color as a distilled pigment. Similarly, she has created an alphabet of marks from the gestural possibilities of her instruments. Her staccato patterns vibrate due not to any digital precision but to their expressive inexactitude. Utilizing her unique mark language and her intuitive grasp of color dynamics, Bull orchestrates undulating resonances across the plane of her paintings.

She has a tendency to opt for long or tall formats, which encourage a different kind of engagement. Standing close and scanning across the surface as a map or scroll enables an unorthodox experience of painting. The work passes by cinematically. Bull’s marks take on the guise of characters, with all the expressive dynamics the metaphor implies. Scenes come and go, and tensions rise and fall. There is no beginning nor end, no stable sense of succession. The viewer is responsible for the unfolding of events, for what their eye may next uncover. This is how Bull paints them. She moves close to the linen, following a trajectory in the composition, developing it through rhythm and harmony, and moves away from it, letting her attention relax, to begin again elsewhere. Ultimately the works arrive at completion — a point at which the dramatic conflicts are not so much resolved but suspended so that their momentum is cast into relief, as a horserider captured in a photograph both gallops and yet is still.

22:31 is emblematic of the rhizomatic character of Bull’s approach. At a distance, the composition dances in a lurching gesticulation, cascading across the plane of the linen. From the weight of the pulsing dark waves atop the picture to the rolling crimson knolls entering from the left, the movements of this work are fluid and responsive. A highlight in this work is the woodgrain pattern spilling in from the bottom left corner in deep reds and crisp whites, which dissolves into a commanding mustard yellow. Moments like these express a just-right-ness that is difficult to explain intellectually and is only truly experienced in the presence of the painting.

Lucy Bull, 22:31, 2023, oil on linen, 175.3 x 330.8 x 4.1 cm. Courtesy the artist and David Kordansky Gallery

Lucy Bull, 22:31 (details)

In practical terms, 18:43a is the most ambitious of the paintings in the exhibition, both due to its scale and Bull's novel use of the diptych format. Large swaths of this linen are occupied by sweeping tail forms, the uncoiled spirals of Bull's gestural alphabet. Along with a gentler palette than is customary, these tender forms lend to the work's overall silky and sedate atmosphere. In the center of the painting, Bull has inserted a bird-like form, mirrored on either side of the crevice, stitching the two panels together. It's a knowing nod to the condition of this extraordinarily wide format. Things accumulate in the lower section of the left panel. The atmosphere of the painting densifies and becomes almost undifferentiated. The textures and marks fuse into tightly bound masses. Momentum seems to halt in this tangled area, unbothered by the airy currents in the upper portion of the panel. In the right panel, the dense entanglement gives way to an arch of rhythmic coils. In the upper section, the bound coils relax and untangle into leafy aerodynamic streams. The overall directionality of the right panel is more freeform, giving the right half of the picture a weight counterposed only by the spate of greens and reds on the left side of the left panel.

Lucy Bull, 18:43a, 2023, oil on linen, 129.5 x 579.8 x 3.8 cm. Courtesy the artist and David Kordansky Gallery

Lucy Bull, 18:43a (details)

Contrasting 18:43a’s oceanic immensity, Gloam foregrounds a tactility of marks, with the candy-apple-reds appearing to sit above the surface of the canvas. There is a greater sense of frenetic energy in this painting, a greater entropic, eruptive inner dynamic. Where 18:43a is introspective and serene, this painting is artificial, sticky, and highly kinetic. It radiates with brilliant electricity. Deep blue underpainting catapults the translucent pinks, oranges, reds, and greens to the surface. The picture seems to emerge here all at once, rather than unfold bit by bit.

Lucy Bull, Gloam, 2023, oil on linen, 121.9 x 91.4 x 2.9 cm. Courtesy the artist and David Kordansky Gallery

Lucy Bull, Gloam (details)

Bull titled the exhibition Venus World, after the sign above the entrance to her new California studio, a leftover from the bridal shop that preceded her in the building. She often titles her paintings for the time they were completed, if not for other fleeting phrases or neologisms that enter her periphery. There is a nonchalance in these strategies congruent with the spirit of her painterly  improvisation. There is an openness to experience that contains the impulse toward making meaning. What they strive to grasp is a slippery thing. They are dependent on the experience of the viewer that stands before them. They are aesthetic, and remarkably so.

Lucy Bull (b. 1990, New York) has been the subject of solo and two-person exhibitions at Pond Society (with Guo Fengyi, Shanghai, 2021); High Art (Arles, 2020; Paris, 2019); Human Resources, Los Angeles (2019); Smart Objects, Los Angeles (2019); and RMS Queen Mary, Mother Culture, Long Beach, California (2017). 

Recent group exhibitions include 13 Women: Variation I, Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa, California (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, Ohio (2021). 

Her work is in the permanent collections of Baltimore Museum of Art; MAMCO Geneva; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Long Museum, Shanghai; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts, among other institutions. Bull lives and works in Los Angeles.