American artist Kristy Luck's paintings combine various organic motifs with loose, flowing forms rendered in vivid colours that conjure an exploration into the subconscious.
Read MoreLuck was born in 1985 in Woodstock, Illinois. She received her BFA from Rockford University in 2010 and later received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2014.
Luck's lush and colourful paintings are rooted in psychological spaces and the subconscious. Her fluid gestures expose an ever-moving and changing colour field, bringing to mind the free-flowing work created during the Surrealist movement or those of Georgia O'Keefe.
Taking inspiration from artists and writers such as Carol Rama and Clarice Lispector, Luck explores sensuality, mystery, and imagination. Through her work, she attempts to find a 'visual language for personal melancholia [...] as an illuminating discourse within oneself.' Central to her paintings are ideas of transformation and coalescence.
In much of her work, Luck has integrated specific natural motifs such as volcanoes, blooming flowers, and tornadoes metamorphosis and change. Volcano Gums (2019), for example, ambiguously features a dark scene of erupting volcanoes while also subtly pointing towards the silhouettes of human teeth.
Luck has also referenced the female reproductive system in her paintings, with Black Sun (2019) mirroring uterine organs and processes through an image of a ravine with seeds and flowers floating down its middle.
Luck's works resist a definitive reading and allow viewers to craft their own interpretations of her dense paintings, which are composed of an amalgamation of several elements, ranging from plants to the human body. In another painting, a gust or the pull of gravity (2021), Luck paints a pink snaking tube across the canvas with hearts emerging from its side and cloudlike formations appearing from both above and below. Its title perhaps hints at the movement of wind, though visually one might recall images of digestive systems or intestines, evidencing the multiplicity of analyses and possible readings within her oeuvre.
Luck has held solo exhibitions at Philip Martin Gallery, Los Angeles; Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo; and Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Chicago. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at SPRING/BREAK, New York and Harbinger Projects, Reykjavík.
Kristy Luck's website can be found here and her Instagram account can be found here.
Arianna Mercado | Ocula | 2022
