Lizzy Lunday

Lizzy Lunday’s paintings are built around how people look at one another and what happens when they are seen. Using the compositional logic of classical painting, she stages scenes that are easy to enter but difficult to pin down. Figures gather, watch, touch, and test one another, yet meaning never fully coalesces. It moves between bodies rather than settling into a single narrative. The work focuses on what it means to be visible now, and what that visibility demands.

Lunday’s practice grows out of postwar American painting’s long engagement with celebrity. Where earlier painters treated celebrity as spectacle and myth, and later turned it inward toward private experience, Lunday addresses myth under a different condition altogether: a world of constant, largely self-generated visibility, staged celebrity, and performed intimacy. In response, she paints figures that aren’t portraits or symbols, but roles (performers, witnesses, instigators) caught between control and exposure. They function less as individuals than as part of a shared choreography. Power shifts subtly from one body to another. Attention matters. Arrangement carries narrative force, but myth no longer arrives as belief or destiny. It operates as performance, as roleplay slips free of consequence and spectacle becomes ambient.

Rather than quoting the past, Lunday puts it back to work. Classical composition remains intact, carrying its full weight of ambition, hierarchy, and visual confidence. What changes are the figures placed within that structure. Her cast of interchangeable, self-performing roles fits comfortably within the language of history painting yet cannot sustain the heightened meaning that language once guaranteed. Gesture, spacing, and gaze take on outsized importance, while color and space drift just enough to prevent resolution. The paintings arrive with the scale and conviction of history painting, but redirect belief toward something else: visibility, performance, and recognition itself.

Lizzy Lunday (born Kansas City, KS, 1992) lives and works in Brooklyn. Her work is currently on view at Peoples, New York. The Sky Below will be her third solo exhibition at Fredericks & Freiser.

The Sky Below

February 19 – March 21, 2026

Press Release