Covering her canvases with networks of rhythmic forms through intuitive mark making, Lucy Bull creates Rorschach-like abstractions that are guides to the unconscious. Bull often scratches at canvases to create images that are atmospheric yet also tactile and sensual, using anywhere from four to twenty layers of paint to create her works’ exquisite surfaces. Inspired by automatic painting and the Surrealist tradition, these biomorphic paintings are speculations on the workings of the human brain.

Eyes of Grass (2020) features the artist’s energetic style of psychedelic brush patterns and acid colors, visualizing a range of sensations that translate texture, weight, and space. Electric greens, blues, and oranges camouflage and collapse with animated forms, causing sublime visual associations. Integrating the foreground, background, and middle ground, the artist creates in the painting an imaginatively precarious space between consciousness and the unconscious. “I think it’s better when you are invited to feel your way through an experience,” says the artist. “It’s through indulging our unconscious that we find reality.” 

Lucy Bull (b. 1990, New York) has work represented in the permanent collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; and the Dallas Museum of Art. Bull lives and works in Los Angeles.