Lucy Bull - 20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Afternoon Session New York Wednesday, November 16, 2022 | Phillips

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  • "Time is everything. I feel like a lot of the paintings function with a timed release. The layers start to shift and unravel, and the more you look, the more you start to see."
    —Lucy Bull
    After a breakout solo show at David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles last year, Lucy Bull is making a name for herself as one of the most exciting young abstract painters. Bull’s tessellating compositions are both surreal and psychedelic, prompting a visceral experience. In Untitled (Green), 2017, rhythmic pulsations are represented via gradations of color as delicate green hues are counterbalanced by deeper blacks. Opacity and shape are carefully built up by the artist’s varied brushwork to create a feathery, ethereal experience.

     

    Untitled (Green) beckons meditative, focused looking, engulfing the viewer in its imagined geometry. Beautiful but also unsettling, Bull encourages viewers to make peace with her work’s concord and discord. The artist has described an interest “in creating a scenario where people can feel their way through a painting,” and indeed her use of repeated forms establishes a sense of movement that allows the viewer to find order within the chaos.i Channeling the unconscious, Bull links herself to the work of Surrealist artists like Max Ernst. Bull has cited influence by Ernst’s technique of frottage, in which the artist placed paper upon various materials and then transposed their surfaces by rubbing pencil or crayon over the paper in an investigation of the subconscious, which is brilliantly evident in the ghostly contours of the present work.

     

    Collector’s Digest

     

    • Lucy Bull’s work has produced several head turning auction results, including Phillips’ sale of 8:50, 2020 in June 2022 for HK$11,382,000, more than seven times its high estimate.

     

    • Bull has has two recent solo shows at David Kordansky Gallery, Piper,  in New York in September–October 2022 and Skunk Grove in Los Angeles in March–May 2021. She has also been the subject of solo exhibitions at High Art, Arles and Paris in 2020 and 2019, respectively; Human Resources, Los Angeles in 2019; and Smart Objects, Los Angeles in 2019.

     

    • Bull’s work is held in the permanent collections of MAMCO Geneva; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; Dallas Museum of Art; and Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami.

     

    • Recent exhibitions include Women of Now, in which Bull showed alongside artists including Anna Park, Lauren Quin, Anna Weyant and Issy Wood at the Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas; Artists Inspired by Music: Interscope Reimagined at Los Angeles County Museum of Art and The Emerald Tablet at Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles.


    i Lucy Bull, interviewed by John Garcia, “Getting Lost in the Brushstrokes: Lucy Bull Interviewed by John Garcia,” BOMB Magazine, April 26, 2021, online

    • Provenance

      Onestar Press, Paris
      Acquired from the above by the present owner

314

Untitled (Green)

signed with the artist's initials and dated "LB 2017" on the reverse
oil on canvas
50 x 30 in. (127 x 76.2 cm)
Painted in 2017.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
$60,000 - 80,000 

Sold for $69,300

Contact Specialist

Patrizia Koenig
Specialist, Head of Day Sale, Afternoon Session
+1 212 940 1279
pkoenig@phillips.com

20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Afternoon Session

New York Auction 16 November 2022