Institute of Contemporary Art Miami ICA Miami

A singular voice in contemporary abstract painting, Lucy Bull 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. 13:13 (2024), commissioned specifically for ICA Miami, is the largest painting that Bull has produced, rising to 39 feet. Like her works in general, 13:13 sits at the edge of language, defying easy descriptions and verbal representation. In it, the macroscopic and the microscopic swap places, as landscapes often morph into depictions of internal psychic spaces. Worlds congeal momentarily in the painting, only to surrender again to a dynamic of constant transformation. Ultimately, 13:13 pushes the viewer’s awareness of looking to the forefront: optical overload and disruptive dissonance intensify typical perception into a hypersensitive mode.

Lucy Bull (b. 1990, New York) has been the subject of solo and two-person exhibitions at the Warehouse, Dallas (2023); Long Museum West Bund, Shanghai (2023); Pond Society, Shanghai (with Guo Fengyi, 2021); High Art (Arles, 2020; Paris, 2019); Human Resources, Los Angeles (2019); Smart Objects, Los Angeles (2019); and RMS Queen Mary, Mother Culture, Long Beach, California (2017). Recent group exhibitions include “13 Women: Variation I,” Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa, California (2022); “Abstract Vocabularies: Selections from the Collection,” Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (2021); and “Present Generations: Creating the Scantland Collection of the Columbus Museum of Art,” Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio (2021). Her work is in the permanent collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; MAMCO, Geneva; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Long Museum West Bund, Shanghai; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; and Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts, among other institutions.