Bonnie Lucas
Beautiful Paint

September 21st — November 2nd, 2024

RUSCHMAN is beyond excited to announce Beautiful Paint, a solo exhibition of brand new paintings by legendary New York artist, Bonnie Lucas. This exhibition marks Lucas’ second solo exhibition with the gallery, and her first solo presentation of new oil paintings in over two decades.

Where Lucas’ earlier period of paintings from the 1980’s and 90’s have been defined by the sly undermining of image through surrealistic distortions of storybook fairytale and illustrative conventions, her latest paintings cherry-pick and ransack motifs from decades of her feminine-feminist prowess, deconstructing floral bouquets, hoop skirts, and cherubic faces down into compositions of intertwining circles, fleshy deep-red rectangles, and mysterious oblongs. Redolent of her soft white yarn and ephemera collages from the 1970’s, these paintings further riff on her signature pink-lemonade pistachio-sherbet-green palette she shares with Fragonard, Strawberry Shortcake, and other lively taste-the-rainbow confections, which has been a key feature of her paintings, drawings, watercolors, collages, assemblages, and plaster moulds.

The errant upside-down dollhouses and everything-including-the-plastic-kitchen-sink nature of her dense previous collage and assemblage works are here translated into jewel box compositions in oil paint on linen and panel surfaces, maneuvering in, out, and through time. Began in the early 2000’s, these fruit punch scatologies and ruddy rose madder eschatologies are built up and stripped back down by “a woman’s touch, a sacred geometry,” as FKA Twigs would call it. In Lucas’ own words, “I like the power I have with a sharp edge.” Layers of oil paint are swathed on in loose gestures of salt water taffy tints, and aggressive scrubs with a palette knife in the deepest reds the color of macerated petals. When layers dry, razorblades are used to shear off excess to unearth lurking yellow lemon drops and a magpie’s lair of purple-lavender-cerulean confetti.

This attention to the dissection and separation of something precious and beautiful, is a loving act harnessed across all aspects of the artist’s output. As Lucas states in her New York Times interview from July 12, 2020, “…I feel like, by poking and spearing, I’m using [these tools] in a clever and wonderful way that is very rewarding to me…I think the power, the pleasure, and my feeling of mastery come when I’ve destroyed these feminine things and I’ve repurposed them in my own way. To make something new that’s mine, that’s whole…I’m yearning to make a small beautiful universe that’s filled with the reality of the times—which is that things are dismembered and cut up. Because what’s going on outside is so scary and dark and worrisome, my little universe will reflect all that. But…I can [also] tell a story where there’s some beauty and some sensuality. It makes me feel alive, it makes me feel sexy, it makes me feel smart. It makes me feel, this is me.”

Surrounding the central dusky red orb in Nine Circles are eight other overlapping discs in artificial forest green scrapes, minty ice cream scoops, and daubs of pink the color of gum that’s been hitchhiking under your shoe sole, all disintegrating into and out of one another. In Red Keyhole with Circles, a white backdrop of a square gets muddied with more overlapping circles like dried rings of strawberry smoothie from an overflowing cup left without a coaster; residue of a saccharine party all pulling the viewer’s gaze toward the central vertical “keyhole” through which to peer (and leer) at something maybe we’re not supposed to. Some Flowers, The Sun (Clay Pot) coalesces these bits of visceral geometry into some of the most representative “imagery” in the show, an arrangement of flowers built like moon cups and magic wands (read also: “magic wands”) being shorn through by bands of coagulated red sun beams.

Bonnie Lucas was born in 1950 in Syracuse, New York. She completed a B.A. in Art History from Wellesley College and an MFA from Rutgers University. In the decades that have followed, her work has been exhibited throughout the United States (New York, Cambridge, Boston, Baltimore, Chicago, Cleveland, Minneapolis, Oakland) and abroad (Netherlands, Finland, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia). In the 1980s, she presented a series of solo exhibitions with the Avenue B Gallery in New York. Her work has been included in projects at the Drawing Center, the International Studio Curatorial Program, Sideshow Gallery, the Painting Center, Art in General, the DeCordova Museum, the Dutch Textile Museum, and Bellevue Art Museum among other institutions. In 2011 Lucas was interviewed by MSNBC.com, and her work has been written about in Artforum, ARTnews, The New York Times, The Village Voice, The New Yorker, and USA Today. In 2014 her work was the subject of a survey exhibition at Sylvia Wald and Po Kim Gallery, an artist-run space in New York. Following on this extensive survey, Lucas presented solo exhibitions at JTT in 2017 and 17ESSEX in 2018, and most recently with RUSCHWOMAN in 2022 and ILY2 in 2023. Lucas lives and works in New York City.

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