A whirlwind of swirling colors swept across the walls of ICA Miami's floors with the opening of artist Lucy Bull's first museum exhibit, “The Garden of Forking Paths,” timed to coincide with this year's Art Basel Miami Beach. As visitors climb the stairs, they are quickly captured by an artificial vortex of movement, a gravitational pull that alternates between rising and falling, emerging and submerging. The sheer dynamism of the 39-foot-tall abstraction leaves viewers in a state of hypnosis, as if they were dealing with some otherworldly animal or unknown energy field. This profound experience culminates in a disturbing combination of vertigo and a heightened awareness of the invisible forces that bind us to the world. Bull's signature style—highly physical, wildly provocative and electrifying—is captivating while simultaneously earthy.
In just a few years, Bull has carved a meteoric path in the art world. Since his 2021 debut exhibition with David Kordansky in Los Angeles, the 34-year-old New York-born, Los Angeles-based artist has become an in-demand star on the market. His abstract visions, both hypnotic and otherworldly, have enchanted collectors, fetching seven figures at auction. On September 26, Bull broke his record at Christie's in Hong Kong, where the piece fetched $2.38 million (HKD18.52m), surpassing his previous total of half a million.
While in Miami opening his first US museum exhibit, Bull took a moment to reflect on his work. “It was a real brain game to find it because my studio had a very high ceiling; I had to use scaffolding for the first time,” Bull told the Observer, gazing at the large, multi-paneled painting. “Actually, I hated working with scaffolding because it changes your relationship with the painting. My process is very physical: I'm constantly alternating and communicating back and forth with the canvas, and I often go backwards. When I work, I am completely immersed in the work.”
Bull explains that the landmark work was created mostly horizontally in his studio, with the canvas rotated or tilted as he worked to understand its flow. There is an incredible energy running through the painting, like the cascading waterfall here that transforms the ICA stairs into a vortex of color and movement. As his first ever site-specific commission, the piece resonates well with the artist's sensibility and location. When it reaches the third floor, the gravity of the painting intensifies, holding the viewer's eye in a rollercoaster-like twist before reversing, leading to a sense of beauty and disorientation that is disturbing yet electrifying.
Following the artist in the showroom, we encounter sixteen paintings created between 2019 and 2024, offering a complete overview of the artist's evolution. Bull is used to working on multiple canvases at once, during a gestation period when the works interact organically, but this is the first time he has seen new paintings from the studio alongside older pieces on loan from private collections and his archive—a landmark anywhere else. a musician. “When I look at them, I honestly feel like making a full circle because the process is always evolving, but I've always embraced the type of movement,” she said. “Being able to visit them again was very rewarding. I feel like I'm grinding myself out of the experience.”
In Bull's paintings, chaos reigns—but chaos with gravity, as brightly colored waves, moving symbols and fantastical objects swirl and move across his canvases. A visual distraction manifests itself as something intentional when you take the time to linger. In his latest works, Bull's compositions have gradually grown, his touch more diffuse, creating atmospheric spaces that invite the eye to wander and relax. “I think it's really important to have empty space, and it gives the eyes a place to rest when I'm taking them to these kind of dense marks,” he explains.
The artist describes his abstract as both a dreamscape and a mindscape, moving his unconscious through a precise process unlike the spontaneous writing of the surrealists. “I want to keep this straight for something that always starts with just a touch,” he said. “The whole process is very precise. I usually start with one or two colors as an idea, but then the direction is determined by how they build and interact. It's more about the application and the application of paint on the surface.”
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The accumulation of marks on Bull's canvases doesn't just create a composition—it creates time itself. His works have a temporal dimension, the result of long hours of mark making where the artist leaves himself completely in the process. “I just love it for a long time. Sometimes, it takes a whole day. I continue until the next day, at 4 am, 5 am or 6 am,” he said. “I like that house when no one bothers you. I am completely immersed in this painting.” It is in this state of immersion—almost ritualistic—that Bull's process transcends the act of painting and becomes a portal to another system of reality, capable of revealing its unexpected truths.
The open fields of the Bull are constantly moving, changing and shifting like organisms caught in the endless cycle of cosmic energy. His paintings become powerful metaphors for what existence is like, reminders of the dynamic nature of matter and energy. “I'd like to stop when I first feel that they're really opening up and giving me this idea that they're going to change and change and change over time,” he explained. At that time, they began to become living, breathing beings.
His process involves an intense dialogue with his changing fields of shape and color, where he scrapes, removes and pulls paint with a touch that feels both deliberate and crude. These piercing actions echo the frottage techniques of Max Ernst, as he digs symbols and forms from the dense layers of his compositions. By juxtaposing marks with open spaces, Bull creates discordant yet harmonious tension, opening up endless avenues of exploration within his richly layered canvases.
As he recounts, his approach to creating brushes and tools came from a project focused on artists' processes. “I really wanted to take one brush and try to expand all kinds of marks that can be made with that one brush,” he said. “Once we introduced color, I started mixing colors and creating layers so the depth really opened up.”
The depth described by Lucy Bull comes from her mysterious ability to stop the subconscious, symbolic elements from the rich tapestry of dreams or surreal, altered states, which open up the possibilities of clairvoyance. Immersed in Bull's dense fields of invisibility, animal patterns and secret systems of symbols begin to appear before us, his canvases suspended between the physical world of physical senses and the more abstract. “I'm always looking for that level of generosity,” he shares. “I want them to have that density that allows the viewer to just get lost in making the mark, and suddenly the strange texture of the stroke is like a facial feature.”
As his first museum survey unfolds around us, it becomes clear that Bull's genius lies in the mystery of his openness. His complexly layered compositions elude clear definition, yet wonderfully suggest a timeless connection to the physical world. The paintings, always in flux, reject fixed definitions or traditional narratives, instead embodying a fluid and interconnected existence. Defying a single or logical definition, they reveal a deeper truth about reality: it is constantly in motion, unfathomable, and alive with endless possibilities.
“Lucy Bull: A Garden of Paths” is on view at ICA Miami through March 30, 2025.
