DANICA LUNDY

Early Years

Born on Salt Spring Island in British Columbia, Canada in 1991, Danica Lundy grew up in a creative, countercultural environment that deeply informed her observational sensibility. She received her BFA from Mount Allison University in New Brunswick before moving to New York, where she earned an MFA in painting from the New York Academy of Art in 2017. During her graduate studies, she trained under painters Eric Fischl and Vincent Desiderio, developing a fluency in academic figuration that she later subverted into densely layered compositions.

Lundy currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Her Canadian roots and formative years in rural settings continue to echo through her work’s interest in natural violence, corporeality, and ritual.

Artworks

Danica Lundy’s paintings are explosive tableaus of contemporary life, capturing intimate yet chaotic moments from perspectives that often defy gravity or logic. Working in oil on canvas, she builds complex figurative compositions that blend cinematic narrative, anatomical detail, and visceral emotion.

Early Works: Adolescent Psychology

In her early paintings, Danica Lundy focused on adolescence as a threshold of confusion, rebellion, and revelation. These works examine the in-between space where childhood dissolves into adult awareness, often rendered with unsettling intimacy. Paintings such as Slouching Towards Bethlehem (2018) and The Fall (2019) show contorted figures trapped in ambiguous moments—wrestling, laughing, bleeding, or collapsing. She frequently paints from disorienting vantage points, such as beneath a car or from inside a locker, which generates a voyeuristic and sometimes claustrophobic tension. The use of exaggerated colour, unstable composition, and recurring objects like ropes, food, or fluids underscores the volatility of the teenage psyche.

Studio Intensity and Inner Violence

Works from 2020 onwards—such as Smoker’s Teeth and Three Hole Punch—mark a shift in Lundy’s practice towards greater density, both visually and emotionally. These paintings depict tightly packed compositions teeming with violence, exhaustion, and sensory overload. Often set in anonymous gymnasiums, classrooms, or locker rooms, the paintings feature recurring motifs like boxing gloves, bruised flesh, tangled limbs, and surgical scars. Figures strain under pressure—physical, emotional, or societal—as if suspended in moments of rupture. Lundy uses this visual chaos to explore what she calls “inner violence”: the invisible forces of expectation, grief, and memory that weigh upon the body, especially the female body.

Larger-Scale Installations

In 2023, Lundy pushed her visual vocabulary into ambitious large-scale formats with Full Salad Days, her solo exhibition at White Cube Bermondsey. Paintings like The Big One and Brain Soup transform the canvas into sprawling arenas of spectacle and scrutiny. Her compositions depict crowds gathered in gymnasiums or bleachers, watching—and sometimes becoming—performers in strange, theatrical acts. Bodies blur into bleachers; intestines become cables or trophies; faces multiply in mirrors or metallic surfaces. By immersing the viewer in these tangled, disjointed spaces, Lundy interrogates the mechanics of looking and the collective appetite for pain, performance, and desire in contemporary culture.

Exhibitions

Danica Lundy has been the subject of both solo exhibitions and group exhibitions at important institutions and blue-chip galleries. A selection of important exhibitions are provided below.

Solo Exhibitions

• Boombox, White Cube, London (2024)
• Stop Bath, White Cube, London (2022)
• Three Hole Punch, Magenta Plains, New York (2022)
• Cherry Log Road, Super Dakota, Brussels (2021)

Group Exhibitions

• he Inside Out, The Hall Art Foundation, Kunstmuseum Schloss Derneburg (2024)
• Women of Now: Dialogues of Memory, Place, and Identity, Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas (2022)
• Off-Nostalg(h)ia, Super Dakota, Brussels (2020)
• Drawn Together Again, The Flag Art Foundation, New York (2019)
• Take Home A Nude, Sotheby’s, New York (2017)

Website and Instagram

Danica Lundy’s website can be found here, and her Instagram can be found here.

Critical Reception

Danica Lundy’s practice has been covered by leading publications including Cultured Mag, Frieze, and The Brooklyn Rail.

Danica Lundy FAQs

Ocula | 2025