LUCY BULL
b. 1990, United StatesLucy Bull’s abstract paintings are characterised by a dreamlike layering of colour, gesture, and form that invites deep visual and psychological engagement. Her contemporary artworks elude easy interpretation, instead conjuring sensations of movement, depth, and temporal distortion.
Early Development
Bull’s earlier works mark a transition from more structured abstraction toward free-flowing, improvisational gesture. Her 2020 solo exhibition Skylining at David Kordansky Gallery was a breakthrough moment, introducing audiences to her signature swirling compositions. Paintings such as 36.5 and Untitled (2020) are densely worked, their surfaces humming with energy. These canvases appear in constant flux, with no fixed orientation, inviting the viewer to rotate, linger, and lose themselves in an unanchored visual field. With colours that bleed and pulsate across the picture plane, Bull’s work in this period began to merge atmospheric abstraction with a hallucinatory sensibility that resists narrative but evokes deep affective response.
Material and Perceptual Explorations
Lucy Bull’s paintings often begin with automatic mark-making, a process of relinquishing control and allowing the composition to emerge organically. Working wet-on-wet, she layers brushstrokes, scrapes, and glazes to build surfaces that are complex, lush, and optically unstable. Colour plays a central role—lime green, cobalt, carmine, ochre, and violet interact in unpredictable ways, producing a prismatic intensity that seems to shift depending on one’s vantage point. Works like No More Blue Tomorrows (2021) and Time Becomes Her (2023) convey a sensation of time expanding and collapsing simultaneously. Bull has described her paintings as “portals,” linking bodily memory with sensory overload, inviting viewers into a slow, durational form of looking.
Recent Practice
In her more recent practice, Bull has scaled up her canvases, pushing the immersive qualities of her abstraction even further. The 2023 exhibition Spared at David Kordansky Gallery showcased monumental paintings that suggest shifting landscapes, astral visions, or psychological terrains without ever fully resolving into figuration. These works foreground Bull’s command of tempo and rhythm—brushstrokes loop, twist, and unravel across the canvas like a visual score. Simultaneously meditative and chaotic, the paintings evoke trance states, altered consciousness, and the porous boundary between inner and outer worlds. By abandoning compositional hierarchy, Bull allows each area of the painting to radiate equally, destabilising how one reads the image and extending the act of seeing.
Exhibitions
Lucy Bull has been the subject of both solo exhibitions and group exhibitions at important institutions. A selection of important exhibitions are provided below.
Solo Exhibitions
- Lucy Bull: The Garden of Forking Paths, Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, Miami (2024)
- Venus World, Long Museum, Shanghai (2023)
- Lucy & Fengyi, Pond Society, Shanghai (2022) [Two-person exhibition]
Group Exhibitions
- Abstraction (re)creation: 20 under 40, X Museum, Beijing (2025)
- How Do We Know the World?, Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore (2024)
- NGV Triennial 2023, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2023)
- He Said/She Said: Contemporary Women Artists Interject, Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas (2023)
- Artists Inspired by Music: Interscope Reimagined, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles (2022)
Website and Instagram
Lucy Bull’s Instagram can be found here, and her Instagram can be found here.
Critical Reception
Lucy Bull’s artwork has garnered attention from leading art publications including Artnet News, Interview Magazine, and The Art Newspaper.
Lucy Bull FAQs
What themes does Lucy Bull explore in her paintings?
Lucy Bull explores themes related to perception, time, memory, and consciousness. Her abstract artworks often evoke dream states, emotional atmospheres, and altered psychological conditions. Through intuitive mark-making and layered colour, she examines how the act of seeing can be immersive and unstable. Bull’s paintings challenge fixed perspective and invite introspection, suggesting internal landscapes or mental states. Thematically, her work engages with the intangible—synaesthesia, spiritual inquiry, and the limits of cognition—while remaining deeply rooted in the sensual, material experience of painting.
What are Lucy Bull’s influences?
Lucy Bull’s influences span a wide range of artists, movements, and perceptual experiences. She draws inspiration from historical abstractionists such as Helen Frankenthaler, Wassily Kandinsky, and Sigmar Polke, whose explorations of gesture and colour resonate with her own intuitive practice. Bull has also been influenced by psychedelic visual culture, spiritual abstraction, and the shifting light and landscape of Los Angeles. Literature, dreams, and automatic drawing inform her process, as do experiential modes of consciousness that embrace chance, improvisation, and embodied perception.
Ocula | 2025
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