A mesmerizing swirl of color sweeps across the entire stairwell wall of ICA Miami with the opening of artist Lucy Bull’s first U.S. museum exhibition, “The Garden of Forking Paths,” which coincides with this year’s Basel Miami Beach The art exhibition will be held at the same time. As visitors ascend the stairs, they are immediately drawn into a synthetic vortex of movement, a gravitational tug-of-war that alternates between rising and falling, emerging and submerged. The sheer energy of the 39-foot-tall abstraction puts viewers in a hypnotic state, as if they are face to face with some otherworldly beast or alien energy field. This immersive experience ultimately creates a disorienting sense of vertigo while also making us more aware of the unseen forces that bind us to the earth. Buell’s signature style – intensely physical, unapologetic and sensual – is both captivating and transcendent.
In just a few years, Buell had carved out a rapidly growing path in the art world. Since his debut in Los Angeles in 2021 with David Kordansky, the 34-year-old New York-born, Los Angeles-based painter has become one of the most popular stars on the market. Her visionary abstract works, both hypnotic and otherworldly, fascinate collectors and fetch seven-figure sums at auction. On September 26, Bull broke her own auction record at Christie’s Hong Kong, when a work was sold for US$2.38 million (HK$18.52 million), breaking her previous record of US$500,000.
While in Miami for the opening of her first American museum exhibition, Bull took some time to reflect on her work. “It was definitely a brain teaser because my studio has a very high ceiling; I had to use some scaffolding for the first time,” Bull told the Observer, gazing up at a massive multi-panel painting. “Honestly, I hate using a scaffold because it changes your relationship to the painting. My process is very physical: I’m constantly going back and forth and interacting with the canvas, and I’m often working backwards. When I’m working, I’m completely immersed in the in this process.
Bull explains that the monumental work was mostly created horizontally in her studio, with the canvas rotating or tilting as she struggled to understand its flow. Enormous energy flows through the painting, like an abstract waterfall, turning the ICA’s stairwell into a whirlpool of color and movement. As her first site-specific commission, the work seamlessly combines the artist’s sensibility with the space in which it occupies. Reaching the third floor, the painting’s gravity intensifies, catching the viewer’s eye like a roller coaster and then flying back, resulting in aesthetic overload and disturbing yet shocking dissonance.
Following the artist into the exhibition hall, we see 16 paintings created between 2019 and 2024, giving us a comprehensive understanding of the artist’s evolving practice. Bull usually works on multiple canvases at the same time, in a gestation process where the works interact organically with each other, but this was her first experience with paintings fresh from the studio as well as older ones borrowed from private collections and her personal archives. Work – This would be a landmark artist for anyone. “Looking at them, I really want to draw a full circle because the process is constantly evolving, but I’ve definitely been embracing some kind of movement,” she said. “It’s really meaningful to be able to revisit them. I feel like I’m digesting them with experience.
Chaos reigns supreme in Buell’s paintings—but it’s a gravitational chaos, with paintings of tides, swirl marks, and magmatic material swirling and churning across her canvases. When you take the time to linger, this apparent chaos becomes apparent as intentional. In her more recent works, Buell’s compositions have become noticeably less dense and her gestures more loose and diffuse, creating atmospheric fields that invite the eye to linger and rest. “I think it’s important to leave space, to give the eye a place to rest as I bring it into this densely marked landscape,” she explains.
The artist describes her abstractions as dreams and mindscapes, channeling her unconscious through an intuitive process similar to the automatic writing of the Surrealists. “I wanted to keep this immediacy of starting with a gesture,” she said. “The whole process is very intuitive. I usually start with one or two colors as an idea, but then the direction depends on how those colors build and interact. This has a lot to do with the application and manipulation of the surface paint.
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The accumulation of marks on Boole’s canvas constructs not only the composition, but also time itself. Her works have a temporal dimension, the result of long periods of mark-making by the artist, a process in which the artist completely abandons himself. “I just love long days. Sometimes, it takes a whole day. I really keep going until the next day comes, 4, 5 or 6 in the morning,” she said. “I just like that kind of space where no one disturbs you. I was completely immersed in the painting. It is in this state of immersion – almost a sense of ritual – that Buell’s creative process transcends the act of painting and becomes A portal to another order of reality, one that reveals unexpected truths about itself.
Boole’s open realm of abstraction is constantly in motion, evolving and mutating, like living organisms caught in the eternal vortex of cosmic energy. Her paintings become powerful metaphors for the fluidity of existence, reminders of the ever-changing nature of matter and energy. “When I start to feel them really opening up and letting me know that they’re going to change and morph and transform over time, I want to stop,” she explains. “That’s when they started to become living, breathing creatures.”
Her creative process involves intense negotiation with dynamic realms of shape and color, as she scrapes, removes and pulls paint with gestures that are both deliberate and raw. These profound movements echo Max Ernst’s daubing technique, in which she mines symbols and forms from the dense layers of her work. By juxtaposing marks with open space, Buell creates a dissonant yet harmonious tension, opening up endless avenues for experimentation in her richly layered canvases.
As she tells it, her creative approach to brushes and tools grew out of a project focused on the artist’s process. “I really wanted to use a brush to try to expand on all the different types of marks that could be made with this brush,” she says. “Then I brought in the colors and started mixing up the colors and layering them so the depth could really open up.”
The depth Lucy Bull describes stems from her uncanny ability to explore the subconscious, conjuring symbolic elements from rich dreams or surreal, altered states, opening up the possibility of clairvoyance. Immersed in Boole’s dense realm of abstraction, animal motifs and secret symbol systems begin to emerge before us, her canvases suspended between the tangible world of sensory reality and more elusive worlds. “I was looking for that level of generosity,” she shared. “I hope their density allows the viewer to get lost in the marks, and suddenly the strange textures of the strokes resemble facial features.”
As Boole’s first museum investigation unfolds around us, it becomes clear that Boole’s genius lies in her open-ended mysteries. Her intricate layered structures are difficult to explain, but they tantalizingly hint at an infinite connection to the physical world. Always changing, these paintings reject fixed definitions or traditional narratives, instead embracing the fluid and interconnected nature of existence. By challenging single or rational descriptions, they reveal a deeper truth about reality: that it is always in motion, elusive, and full of infinite possibilities.
“Lucy Bull: Garden of Forking Paths” will be on display at ICA Miami through March 30, 2025.
