ICA Miami presents the first U.S. museum exhibition of Los Angeles–based painter Lucy Bull (b. 1990, New York), “Lucy Bull: The Garden of Forking Paths.” A singular voice in contemporary abstract painting, Bull’s dynamic practice 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.
Bull’s works sit at the edge of language. In them, the macroscopic and the microscopic tend to swap places, as landscapes often morph into depictions of internal psychic spaces. Worlds congeal momentarily in her paintings, only to surrender again to a dynamic of constant transformation. Bull’s works are enlivened by modulating emotional temperatures and by the courting of far-reaching associations. Ultimately, they push viewers’ awareness of looking to the forefront: optical overload and disruptive dissonance move typical perception into a hypersensitive mode.
“Lucy Bull: The Garden of Forking Paths” includes sixteen paintings produced between 2019 and 2024. Among these are recent large-scale horizontal works that stretch over ten feet across. These expansive works inaugurate a new field of exploration for the artist and are brought together for the first time here. Alongside these, the exhibition includes a number of vertical paintings that continue the artist’s pictorial research over the last decade.
In parallel to the exhibition, Bull will create the next stairwell commission at ICA Miami, which will be on view through September 2025.
Bull has been the subject of solo and two-person exhibitions at David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles (2024), The Warehouse, Dallas (2023); Long Museum West Bund, Shanghai (2023); David Kordansky Gallery, New York (2022), Pond Society, Shanghai (with Guo Fengyi, 2021); David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles (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 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.
“Lucy Bull: The Garden of Forking Paths” is organized by ICA Miami and curated by Gean Moreno, Director of the Art + Research Center at ICA Miami.
