Lucy Bull – Biography, Abstract Paintings and Key Works

Lucy Bull makes abstract paintings that seem to change while they are being seen: color gathers into possible bodies, landscapes, or weather systems, then slips back into paint. Working through layered oil, scratched passages, and shifts in scale, the American artist turns sustained looking into the real subject of her work.

Key Takeaways

• Lucy Bull is a New York-born American painter. Born in 1990, she earned a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2012 and now lives and works between Los Angeles and New York.
• Her paintings are abstract but rich in associations. Viewers may recognize faces, figures, plants, microscopic structures, or cosmic spaces, yet no single interpretation settles the image.
• Process is central. Bull builds oil paint on linen over repeated sessions, alternating spontaneous marks with reflective decisions, scratching into surfaces, and allowing earlier layers to reappear.
• Color creates both attraction and tension. Vivid or acidic hues, complementary contrasts, translucent veils, and denser passages can make a surface feel luminous, unstable, and spatially deep.
• Scale changes the encounter. Her work ranges from intimate vertical canvases to panoramic paintings and the 39-foot-tall triptych 13:13, made for ICA Miami.
• Her museum presence has grown rapidly. ICA Miami organized her first U.S. museum exhibition in 2024, and her work is held by institutions including the Hirshhorn, LACMA, MOCA Los Angeles, ICA Miami, and the Long Museum.

Who Is Lucy Bull?

Lucy Bull was born in New York City in 1990. She spent her early childhood in Brooklyn, grew up outside the city, and returned for pre-college art classes. Bull attended the Rhode Island School of Design before transferring to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she received her BFA in 2012. She did not pursue an MFA. After college and a period in New York, she moved to Los Angeles in 2014, where her mature approach to painting took shape.

A salon-style gallery of paintings in the RISD Museum; Kenneth C. Zirkel, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Bull has described learning through practice and gradually finding a process that could produce the intensity she wanted. Early experiments included sculpture, video, ceramics, pastel, and light-box paintings, but she approached them with a painter’s concern for color, surface, and sensation.

What Do Lucy Bull’s Paintings Look Like?

Bull’s paintings are nonrepresentational, but they rarely feel empty of imagery. Tangled lines, rounded forms, stains, and cloudy zones appear to assemble into something recognizable. A viewer might momentarily see a face, flower, coastline, cell, or nebula before another look dissolves it. This oscillation is not a puzzle with one solution; it is the engine of the experience.

The paintings also disrupt ordinary distinctions of scale. A passage can resemble a satellite view and a microscope slide at once. Dense areas suggest matter compressed close to the surface, while transparent or sparsely marked zones seem to open behind it. The eye moves between near and far without a stable horizon.

ICA Miami emphasized this macroscopic-microscopic exchange in presenting Bull’s work, noting how her paintings make viewers conscious of the act of looking itself. Color does much of the structural work. Bull favors vivid combinations and has spoken of complementary colors creating a kind of static buzz. Warm and cool passages can pull in opposing directions; a bright accent may act like a focal point only to be displaced by another mark. Rather than filling in a predetermined drawing, color produces movement, atmosphere, and emotional pressure.

How Lucy Bull Builds a Painting

Starting Without a Fixed Image

Bull generally does not begin with a preparatory image. A remembered lighting condition or desired color may provide an initial impulse, but she does not treat it as a plan to execute. The first marks initiate a chain of responses. Each layer changes what the next decision can be, and even marks later buried beneath paint continue to shape the surface above them.

She usually keeps at least three paintings in progress. Moving among them resets her vision, and a canvas may rest for days or even a month. Her surfaces therefore contain impulse alongside delay, reconsideration, and editing.

Layering, Scratching, and Excavation

The back-and-forth is visible in the material. Bull builds networks of oil marks that may be veiled, sharpened, or partially erased. Scratching into accumulated paint can bring an older layer forward, an operation she has compared to excavation and Max Ernst’s frottage. The surface holds several moments at once.

Working in black and white for an artist’s book expanded Bull’s range of marks. Reintroducing color and painting over older canvases produced greater depth. A quick-looking streak in a finished work may therefore sit above months of revision.

Knowing When to Stop

Bull does not describe completion as the resolution of every uncertainty. She stops when a painting opens up—when its parts can continue to shift in relation to one another and generate new associations. A too-explicit figure can close that field. In one discussion of 3:10, she explained that a face emerging from the texture became so clear that it short-circuited other possible readings; she ultimately removed it, although a trace remained perceptible to her.

Ambiguity in Bull’s work is precise rather than vague. The paintings are heavily worked to preserve multiple possibilities, frustrating the viewer’s desire to stabilize what cannot be fixed.

Time, Film, and the Experience of Looking

Many Lucy Bull paintings have titles that resemble digital clock readings: 12:18, 13:35, 00:09, and 13:13. It is tempting to convert those numbers into a key to the images, but their strongest effect is more basic. They turn attention toward duration. Bull has said that her paintings can have a “timed release”: layers unfold as looking continues. The numerical titles reinforce that awareness without dictating what a viewer should see.

Lucy Bull, Untitled; CC BY-NC 2.0, via Flickr

Bull has identified cinema as a major inspiration and favored thinking space. She does not illustrate movie scenes; an afterimage, lighting effect, or hard-to-name feeling can instead become a starting point. The connection is experiential rather than narrative.

That relationship became public during Ash Tree, her 2024 exhibition at David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles. Bull accompanied the show with a 24-hour film marathon at the Lumiere Cinema and made a three-part painting for the theater marquee that existed for the duration of the event. The project linked painting to a place where images, time, and collective attention already converge.

Key Paintings by Lucy Bull

Most Attractive, 2019

At approximately 50 by 60 inches, Most Attractive belongs to the period when Bull’s mature language was emerging. Its verbal title differs from the later clock-like names and asks what catches the eye and holds attention. ICA Miami included it in its 2019–2024 survey.

Eyes of Grass, 2020

Eyes of Grass is an 84-by-56-inch painting in ICA Miami’s collection. Its title joins bodily vision to plant life without literally describing the image. The tall format encourages an up-and-down scan rather than a landscape’s lateral movement.

Stinger, 2021

The 54-by-79-inch Stinger shows how a charged word affects abstract viewing. Its title can make a pointed mark or color contrast feel bodily or electric, although no illustrated insect is required. The work appeared with Nacar at The Warehouse in Dallas.

12:18, 2022

Now in the Hirshhorn, 12:18 is a narrow vertical painting measuring 60 by just over 30 inches. Its proportions concentrate the field and make the canvas’s physical presence unusually strong.

13:35, 2023

At 54 by 150 inches, 13:35 is emphatically panoramic. It cannot be absorbed from one focal point, so the gaze must travel—a viewing pattern Bull developed further in large horizontal works for ICA Miami.

00:09, 2024

Made for Ash Tree, 00:09 is a diptych measuring 51 by 228 inches overall. Its seam interrupts an extreme panorama while linking its parts. The format engages peripheral vision and encourages movement along the image.

13:13, 2024

ICA Miami commissioned 13:13 for its central stairwell. The oil-on-linen triptych rises 39 feet, making it the largest painting Bull had produced at the time. Because the enclosed architecture prevents a single frontal overview, viewers encounter the work in sections while climbing or descending. The body supplies the sequence; painting becomes an environment measured through movement.

Bull worked largely with the three canvases horizontal, rotating them to test their eventual vertical flow. The commission shows that her improvisation still requires engineering, proportion, and physical problem-solving.

Major Exhibitions and Museum Recognition

Lucy Bull: The Garden of Forking Paths, organized by curator Gean Moreno at ICA Miami from December 2024 through March 2025, was Bull’s first U.S. museum exhibition. It brought together 16 paintings made between 2019 and 2024. Earlier vertical formats appeared beside recent horizontal works more than ten feet wide, allowing visitors to compare density, transparency, orientation, and scale across five years.

The title came from Jorge Luis Borges’s story of branching time and suited Bull’s interest in future interpretations. The selection reopened recurring problems: how marks become images, how color creates space, and how perception changes with time.

Bull’s work is held in public collections including the Albertina in Vienna, the Baltimore Museum of Art, Dallas Museum of Art, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, ICA Miami, LACMA, Long Museum West Bund, MAMCO Geneva, MOCA Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Pérez Art Museum Miami, Rose Art Museum, and Speed Art Museum. A collection list does not determine artistic value, but this institutional range indicates that her paintings are being preserved and studied beyond their immediate gallery and market context.

Where Lucy Bull Fits in Contemporary Abstraction

Bull’s work can be placed in conversation with gestural abstraction, Surrealist automatism, and the optical effects of postwar color painting. The physical mark, the unconscious association, and the clash of complementary hues all have historical precedents. She has directly invoked Max Ernst when discussing frottage-like excavation, while her emphasis on color as a visceral tool connects her to a much broader tradition.

Those contexts should not become a shortcut. Bull’s paintings resist the mythology of one heroic gesture because they accumulate through sessions, pauses, revisions, and simultaneous canvases. Their rules develop inside the encounter with each surface.

Her most distinctive contribution is the way she makes ambiguity durable. A painting offers abundant visual information without resolving into a stable scene. In an image-saturated culture trained for immediate recognition, that delay has force. The work asks not “What is it?” once, but “What is it becoming?” for as long as the viewer remains present.

Curating Beyond the Canvas

Bull also organizes exhibitions through From the Desk of Lucy Bull, a tabletop project that began in her East Hollywood apartment and now operates in New York’s East Village. She started the venue after a hand injury temporarily prevented her from painting. Its original low-table format brought visitors close to artworks and to one another, replacing the distanced authority of a conventional white cube with an intimate gathering.

Later projects used unusual sites. CRASH occupied a blue Toyota Prius for two days in 2022, while CRABS placed tiny works on hermit-crab shells before returning them to tide pools at Topanga Beach. Like her paintings, they test how context directs attention.

Why Lucy Bull’s Art Matters

Lucy Bull has built a recognizable practice without turning recognition into a formula. Her paintings can be sensuous on first contact—bright, layered, and physically assertive—but their deeper achievement depends on slowness. Forms emerge, compete, and recede. An apparent accident reveals structure; an inviting color becomes dissonant; a dense zone opens into distance.

That experience makes the viewer an active participant. Bull does not provide a subject to decode or a narrative to follow. She constructs conditions in which perception becomes mobile. From an apartment tabletop to a 39-foot museum commission, her work asks how scale, time, color, and setting change what vision can do.

Frequently Asked Questions About Lucy Bull

What Is Lucy Bull Best Known For?

Lucy Bull is best known for layered abstract oil paintings whose vivid colors and shifting forms generate multiple associations. Her surfaces can suggest bodies, landscapes, organic matter, or cosmic space without becoming fixed representations.

Where Did Lucy Bull Study?

Bull attended the Rhode Island School of Design before transferring to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She earned her BFA from SAIC in 2012 and did not complete an MFA.

What Materials Does Lucy Bull Use?

Her principal medium is oil paint on linen. She builds, manipulates, scratches, and revises layered surfaces, although her broader practice has also included light boxes, ceramics, video, pastel, and site-specific curatorial projects.

Are Lucy Bull’s Paintings Completely Abstract?

They are nonrepresentational in the sense that they do not illustrate predetermined subjects. However, Bull deliberately leaves room for recognizable associations to emerge. The tension between abstract marks and possible images is a defining feature of the work.

What Was Lucy Bull’s First U.S. Museum Exhibition?

The Garden of Forking Paths at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, was her first U.S. museum exhibition. On view from December 3, 2024, through March 30, 2025, it presented 16 paintings made between 2019 and 2024.

How Should You Look at a Lucy Bull Painting?

Begin with the whole field, then follow one color, mark, or layer without trying to identify a single subject. Change your distance and let early readings dissolve. The paintings are designed to reward duration, so uncertainty is not a failure to understand them; it is part of the work.