ART CITIES: Miami-Lucy Bull

A singular voice in contemporary abstract painting, Lucy Bull’s dynamic practice explores the formal and experiential concerns of the medium. Through a dynamic application of paint, Bull choreographs energetic gestures into eruptive fields of pictorial activity. In her works, exuberant colors and elusive forms, reference and atmosphere, density and transparency are in constant tension.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: ICA Miami Archive

Lucy Bull’s solo exhibition “The Garden of Forking Paths” includes sixteen paintings produced between 2019 and 2024. Among these are recent large-scale horizontal works that stretch over ten feet across. These expansive works inaugurate a new field of exploration for the artist and are brought together for the first time here. Alongside these, the exhibition includes a number of vertical paintings that continue the artist’s pictorial research over the last decade. In recent years, Bull has emerged as an inquisitive, open-eyed, and critically minded voice in contemporary painting. Her dedication to courting the unknown, as well as her ability to cultivate a personal and flexible vocabulary with broad metaphorical resonance, make her a notable representative of artistic legacies in which abstraction and visionary states play foundational roles. Her paintings take shape in a varied field of impressions, material experiments, and color-based meditations, their formalism balanced by the implied presence of phenomena that are difficult to capture using visual means alone. While ephemeral and even invisible phenomena have long been the subjects of abstract art, Bull registers them as avenues of possibility, encouraging immersive acts of looking in which viewers find their way by losing themselves again and again. The exhibition features some of Bull’s largest canvases to date, including horizontal diptychs whose expansive proportions invite comparisons to cinematic narratives or spatial journeys from one landscape into another. The proposition of landscape, which has been one of several through lines for the artist over the last few years, remains an interpretive touchstone for these new paintings. However, Bull has conceptualized the exhibition so that seeming vistas function in new and numerous ways. In one of the galleries, for instance, vertical paintings are installed so that their areas of color and gesture appear to reveal views into a forested world on the other side of the walls. This emphasizes the means by which Bull sees through her work: painting enables a kind of seeing that in turn allows those who participate in it to look through what appears before them into other spaces or states of mind. Painting, in other words, becomes not just the thing seen, but the thing that sees. The advances of Bull’s new paintings lie in the commitment with which the artist approaches this process. On purely visual terms, meanwhile, the compositions have become more layered and chromatically complex, and seem to channel an accordingly diverse range of emotional temperatures, from grave, searching patterns that echo like the open spaces of the sublime to upbeat, major-keyed passages notable for their ethereal lightness and transparency. Working with a delimited selection of hues at any given time, she has developed a methodology that is adjacent to the intentional, layer-by-layer movement of the printmaker; in contrast with the planned and relatively predictable unfolding of the printmaker’s task, however, Bull incorporates procedural layers of unknowing, trance-like symbiosis in which the painting can be in control of its materialization as much as—or even more than—the artist herself. Bull’s work prompts acts of viewing perhaps best described with terms like relinquishment, release, and stimulation, that imply physical engagement. The scope of the newest paintings requires an analogous level of embodied commitment and faith from the artist, who, in the attempt to manipulate broad sections of pigment and medium, must also reconcile herself to allowing certain passages to remain out of reach. Such passages hinge on a mode of composition in which forms come into being through strategic acts of letting go as much as they do through intentional instances of mark-making. The characteristic gestures that make up Bull’s language, including the frottage she uses to delineate spaces and indicate movement, are accordingly porous when it comes to their ability to allow for surprise and transparency of layering. Participating in the alternating flux of coherence and generative disorder requires a kind of attention that also alternates, shuttling between active perception and open, receptive ways of being. Bull has made reference to her interest in other forms of aesthetic production, including music and film, in which awareness of ambient information becomes an important facet of the experience of the work. This includes an interest in the changes in perception that take place when visual and sound experiences are layered upon each other. In parallel to the exhibition, Bull will create the next stairwell commission at ICA Miami, which will be on view through September 2025.

Photo: Lucy Bull, 4:28, 2024. Oil on linen, 100 x 76 x 1 1/4 inches (254 x 193 x 3.2 cm) Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery. Photo credit: Elon Schoenholz

Info: Institute of Contemporary Art Miami (ICA Miami), 61 NE 41st St, Miami, FL, USA, Duration: 3/12/2024-30/3/2025, Days & Hours: Wed-Sun 11:00-18:00, https://icamiami.org/