Lucy Bull

Lucy Bull lives and works in Los Angeles. She studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she developed the experimental, process-driven approach that continues to underpin her practice. Early training in figure drawing gave way to a more exploratory relationship with mark-making, and over time her focus shifted away from predetermined outcomes and toward ambiguity and discovery, an orientation that would come to define her work.

A pivotal moment in Bull’s practice came in 2017, when she spent a prolonged period painting with only a single color and brush, studying the subtle effects that could emerge through variations in gesture and technique. The experience transformed her understanding of line, process and depth, laying the foundation for her distinctive method of building paintings through successive layers of paint that are repeatedly worked, obscured and carved back into with a repurposed wood-carving blade—a process she has likened to archaeology.

The dynamism of her compositions often evokes associative images in the viewer, fleeting projections that emerge and recede with each encounter. Bull has said that ‘art is really just stored time,’ and that her paintings ‘function with a timed release,’ so that ‘the more you look, the more you start to see.’ Her canvases resist single points of entry, fixed leading lines and definitive resolutions. Instead, each workinvites a new passage across the surface. Balancing spontaneity and structure, Bull’s compositions draw viewers into a continually shifting experience of color, space and sensation.

Bull’s engagement with art extends well beyond her own studio practice. Since 2018, she has organized ‘From the Desk of Lucy Bull,’ an itinerant curatorial project that began on a coffee table in her East Hollywood apartment and has evolved into an ongoing platformfor exhibitions, collaborations and site-specific projects. Bringing together artists across generations and disciplines, the project reflects Bull’s curatorial instinct as well as her longstanding commitment to artistic community, exchange and creating unexpected contexts in which to encounter art.

While Bull’s work has prompted wide-ranging art-historical associations—from Pierre Bonnard and Charles Burchfield to Max Ernst and the colorists of the 16th-century Venetian school—its resistance to any singular genealogy is fundamental to its power. Writing in the catalogue for the artist’s first US museum exhibition at the ICA Miami in 2024 – 25, critic Barry Schwabsky describes Bull as ‘a painter of incipient states’ whose canvases make ‘the activity of making painting reveal itself.’

Bull has been the subject of solo and two-person exhibitions at institutions including the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami FL (2024 – 25); The Warehouse, Dallas TX (2023); Long Museum West Bund, Shanghai, China (2023); and Pond Society (with Guo Fengyi), Shanghai, China (2021). Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Albertina Museum, Vienna, Austria; Baltimore Museum of Art, MD; Columbus Museum of Art, OH; Dallas Museum of Art, TX; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles CA; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami FL; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Milwaukee Art Museum, WI; MAMCO Geneva (Musée d’art moderne et contemporain), Switzerland; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles CA; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego CA; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia; Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa CA; Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham MA; and Speed Art Museum, Louisville KY.