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Thursday 6 February

Lucy Bull: The Revolutionary of Perception

Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs: it’s time we talk about Lucy Bull (born in 1990 in New York), this artist who shakes your certainties about abstraction like an 8.0-magnitude earthquake on the Richter scale of contemporary art. While some of you are still swooning over your Rothko reproductions bought on Amazon, Bull transforms painting into a total sensory experience that hits you like a bullet train at 300 km/h.

First, her technique. Bull doesn’t paint—she orchestrates a controlled chaos that would make Nietzsche blush with his concepts of Apollonian and Dionysian. Her canvases are battlefields where layers of paint accumulate like geological strata, sometimes up to twenty overlapping layers. She scratches, digs, unearths buried traces like an archaeologist of the subconscious. It’s like Max Ernst on acid—but better. Her works are giant Rorschach tests that force you to confront your own psychic demons.

Let’s talk about the hallucinatory surfaces she creates. In The Bottoms (2021), colors clash with the violence of a boxing match: chartreuse against fuchsia, as if Matisse and Kandinsky had stepped into an octagon for a chromatic MMA fight. The cascading circles evoke a psychedelic lunar cycle, as if Timothy Leary had redesigned the Mayan calendar. It’s so intense that even my Ray-Bans can’t dampen the impact.

Bull works like a high-performance athlete, locking herself in her studio for marathon sessions that sometimes last until dawn. She’s not part of the bohemian artist charade, painting between two €10 lattes. No, she’s on an obsessive quest for that precise moment when painting transcends its materiality to become pure sensation. It’s Merleau-Ponty meets Jackson Pollock at a philosophical rave.

Her first major theme is this exploration of time as a malleable dimension. Her canvases aren’t frozen snapshots but temporal portals where layers of paint tell a non-linear story. It’s as if she took Einstein’s theory of relativity and translated it into pigments and textures. In 13:35 (2023), time folds and unfolds like quantum origami. Jade greens dive into corals and navy blues, creating currents that defy conventional chronology.

The second theme defining her work is her obsession with perceptual ambiguity. Bull plays with our brains like a DJ mixes tracks, creating transitions so fluid between forms that you can’t tell where abstraction begins and figuration ends. It’s visual Georges Bataille—a fascination with the formless that takes shape, then deforms. In Stinger (2021), she creates a hallucinated jungle where organic forms pulse with their own life, as if the canvas itself were breathing. It’s a perceptual labyrinth where even Theseus would happily get lost.

Her creative process is as rigorous as a mathematical theorem but as instinctive as a shamanic trance. She begins with a phase of automatic painting that would make André Breton drool with envy, then sculpts these layers like Rodin shaped clay, but with the surgical precision that would make a neurosurgeon jealous. It’s this tension between control and surrender that gives her works their magnetic power.

In her exhibition The Garden of Forking Paths at ICA Miami (2024), Bull takes the experience even further with a monumental 12-meter-tall painting. It’s as if she decided to create an abstract cathedral for the 21st century—a space where transcendence doesn’t need figuration to elevate us spiritually. Even Walter Benjamin would have to revise his theory of the artwork’s aura in the face of such physical presence.

This artist understands something most of you, stuck in your 20th-century aesthetic certainties, have yet to grasp: contemporary art isn’t here to make you comfortable with pretty decorations for your living room. It’s here to shake you, destabilize you, and make you doubt your perceptions. Bull doesn’t paint pictures; she creates experiences that challenge our relationship to time, space, and consciousness itself.

Her works are like visual viruses that infect your cerebral cortex and reconfigure your way of seeing the world. It’s art that works as a neurological reset—a control-alt-delete for your perceptual system. In an era bombarded by superficial digital images, Bull reminds us that painting can still be a revolutionary medium.

If you don’t understand her work, maybe it’s because you’re trying too hard to understand it. Her paintings aren’t puzzles to solve but experiences to live. It’s like trying to explain the taste of umami to someone who’s only ever eaten Big Macs. You need to develop your visual palate, learn to savor complexity, accept being destabilized.

Critics who attempt to categorize her as merely an heir to abstract expressionism completely miss the point. Bull isn’t inheriting; she’s evolving the language of painting like a virus mutates to survive. She’s creating a new visual dialect that speaks directly to our neurons, bypassing rational filters to reach something more primal.

I can already hear some of you mumbling that it’s “too abstract”, “too chaotic”. But that’s exactly the point. For those of you desperately trying to fit everything into neatly ordered boxes, Bull reminds us that chaos is not only inevitable but necessary. Her paintings are visual manifestos for embracing uncertainty, celebrations of ambiguity.

Bull is redefining what painting can be in the 21st century. She proves that even after centuries of art history, it’s still possible to do something radically new with paint on canvas. It’s as if she’s found a new octave in a musical scale we thought was complete.

Watching her work in her Los Angeles studio is like observing a particle physicist who’s traded her accelerator for paintbrushes. She manipulates pictorial matter with the precision of a scientist and the intuition of a shaman. Each painting is an experiment; every brushstroke, a hypothesis on the nature of perception.

Yes, her prices are skyrocketing at auctions, reaching stratospheric heights like her 16:10 (2020), which sold for €1.8 million at Sotheby’s. But unlike some artists riding the speculative wave of the market, Bull remains focused on the essential: pushing the limits of what painting can do to our consciousness.

She works like someone possessed, on a quasi-mystical quest for that moment when painting transcends its materiality. It’s this monastic devotion to her craft, combined with rare intellectual audacity, that makes her one of the most important voices of her generation.

Lucy Bull isn’t just an artist who paints abstract pictures. She’s a researcher exploring the frontiers of human consciousness, with painting as her measuring instrument. Her works are portals to perceptual dimensions we’ve only glimpsed until now. And if you’re not ready to take this journey, well, stay in your comfort zone with your impressionist posters. Meanwhile, the rest of us will explore the new territories she maps out, brushstroke by brushstroke.

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