Lizzy Lunday
Fredericks & Freiser is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Lizzy Lunday. Lunday’s paintings, some of which are her largest yet, harness the logics of history painting to consider the kinds of social networks that accrue cultural currency today. A term first designated in the seventeenth century in the French Royal Academy, history painting became, by the Academy’s standards, the most important and rigorous genre of art production. Superseding portraiture, still lifes, and landscape, history painting was first designated to those scenes of Biblical passages, Greek and Roman classical history, and classical mythology. By the end of the eighteenth century, though, history painting came to encompass more modern subjects, like revolutionary battle scenes. Unreliable in their veracity yet absolutely grandiose, history paintings attempted to cohere colonial power and legacy. The artist co-opts strategies of the genre in her new suite of paintings as scenes of encounter are staged at a larger-than-life scale, at once taking seriously and satirizing what contemporary society deems as newsworthy events.
Lunday arranges her compositions’ prototypes digitally first, creating collages of images culled from pop culture (reality TV, Instagram, etc.) and her own archive. Relentless, in regard to form, the artist reworks these collages and eventually the canvases, erasing and re-painting over and again: the result is an amalgam of bodies constituting their own social network within the confines of the canvas. The uncanny recognizable features of some of Lunday’s characters only get the viewer so far: their familiarities, one way the viewers are seduced into the compositions, are rendered of secondary importance as the bodies and emotions cohere in surprising ways. Resolutely flat, Lunday’s compositions heighten their untenable spaces as background and foreground are unreliable touchstones of perspective. People and architecture slide into one another. These elisions mimic the unknowable authenticity of the media images consumed ad nauseam today. Thick outlines of bodies are trustworthy maps of corporeal contours until they trick the viewer and suddenly disappear as background swaths of color take over arms and legs. One body stretches horizontally across the canvas, while another body’s fragments hover above. Refusing authentic coloration and contained spaces, the artist deploys bright hues that intensify the emotions communicated within. Pink thighs are contoured by oranges and yellows while stripes from one woman’s dress exceed her own torso, zooming out and down away from her body.
Her figures’ forms and positioning recall classical arrangements where each body activates specific space and relationalities within the composition. Set within architectural spaces determined by black-and-white checkered floors, verdant landscaping, and arched openings, Lunday’s works feel anchored in specific sites. But just as the viewer feels a sense of understanding, the artist pulls the rug out, throwing any sense of knowing into fuzzier, more universal possibilities. The inability to disentangle real from artifice is central to Lunday’s motivations as the artist remains fascinated by how people constitute their sense of self through their consumed media. Images cycle through, are devoured and regurgitated, only to leave behind resonances that inform realities. Lunday’s depicted actions, like the figure who throws a punch in one canvas or the woman throwing her hands up in seeming frustration in another, are treated with the same reverence as Eugène Delacroix’s approach to the French Revolution and Jacques-Louis David’s rendering of Napoleon’s coronation. Where for Delacroix the womanly figure of Liberty heads up the rebellion, Lunday’s heroes are rendered like contemporary sirens, at once absolutely seductive and also manipulative, able to direct her followers’ attention at will. The artist’s protagonists, enraptured by their own mediated presences, are treated equally whether they are positioned in selfie-friendly arrangements or in canonical formations familiar in the history of art.
