Lizzy Lunday American, b. 1992

Lizzy Lunday’s paintings distort the boundaries between the real and the artificial to consider the precarity of intimacy. Combining images from the media and her personal archives, the artist’s compositions foreground what happens when the strange and the familiar collide. Bold coloration destabilizes the already haunting scenes while urgent painterly gestures highlight the relationships between the figures. Set within dream-like environments, Lunday’s figures are captured in moments of intimacy pricked by the threat of complications and idealizations. Figures embrace but look away from each other, outsized hands grip passionately onto bodies, and unsettling colors vibrate against each other. Emphatic swashes of paint are met with beautiful expressions of bodily details that are unreliable in what they communicate. There are outlines of body parts that do not always contain flesh and instead exist as specters of motions past or projections of actions to come. Exploring the space between tender and territorial, Lunday’s paintings speak to the disconnect of mediated, idealized intimacy and its often awkward, inarticulable lived experience.