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Lot Essay
A psychedelic miasma of purples and blues unfolds across the surface of Lucy Bull’s No More Blue Tomorrows (2018), whorled with fine texture and lit up by tongues of yellow flame. It is a mesmerising vision, its nebulous, biomorphic forms hinting at known shapes and spaces before dissolving back into abstract mirage. Bull builds her complex, layered paintings intuitively, letting herself be guided by their materials: here, she appears to have scored the final glaze of paint with the end of her brush, combing it into plumes of translucent, feathery pattern that radiate out from the aureoles and contours of colour behind. Endlessly evocative, the work offers a galactic, hypnotic space for the eye and mind to wander, conjuring their own mirages of feeling and association: at the same time, it bares its painterly surface openly, involving the viewer intimately in the hard-won process of its creation.
After graduating from the Art Institute of Chicago in 2012, Bull moved to Los Angeles, where she lives and works today. The city’s sun-drenched, dreamlike atmosphere—and its saturation with the virtual worlds of cinema—can be seen to inform the engulfing, phantasmagorical impact of her works. ‘When I’m painting,’ she says, ‘I’m always thinking about creating the same kind of psychic space that a movie does because I think it’s better when you are invited to feel your way through an experience. It’s through indulging our unconscious that we find reality’ (L. Bull, quoted in K. Herriman, ‘Artist Lucy Bull Invites Others into Her Cosmos’, Cultured Mag, 7 December 2020). Stirring the senses and imagination alike, No More Blue Tomorrows invites us to take this plunge, its wistful title suggesting a gateway to possibilities and realms as yet unseen. Bull’s work is in the permanent collections of MAMCO Geneva; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts; the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; the Dallas Museum of Art; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami.
After graduating from the Art Institute of Chicago in 2012, Bull moved to Los Angeles, where she lives and works today. The city’s sun-drenched, dreamlike atmosphere—and its saturation with the virtual worlds of cinema—can be seen to inform the engulfing, phantasmagorical impact of her works. ‘When I’m painting,’ she says, ‘I’m always thinking about creating the same kind of psychic space that a movie does because I think it’s better when you are invited to feel your way through an experience. It’s through indulging our unconscious that we find reality’ (L. Bull, quoted in K. Herriman, ‘Artist Lucy Bull Invites Others into Her Cosmos’, Cultured Mag, 7 December 2020). Stirring the senses and imagination alike, No More Blue Tomorrows invites us to take this plunge, its wistful title suggesting a gateway to possibilities and realms as yet unseen. Bull’s work is in the permanent collections of MAMCO Geneva; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts; the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; the Dallas Museum of Art; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami.