Lucia Love’s visually rich paintings and drawings are loaded with narrative and symbolism, with references to art history, mythology, politics, and the dynamics of power.

This presentation highlights their experimental drawing practice, featuring a selection of works made with ink and watercolor on paper.

Like a work of speculative fiction, Love often creates a pastiche of fantasy and reality, as elements sourced from news media exist on an equal plane to those of pure imagination.

Love’s drawings are quite different from one another stylistically—some feeling more abstract and painterly, as if the image is materializing right before your very eyes, and others feel more reflective of their background in animation with their bold use of line. They use the medium in a free-flowing way, to workshop characters, ideas, and formal elements before they appear in their more concrete forms in their paintings.

Lucia Love (b. 1988, New York, NY) attended the School of Visual Arts on a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, where they studied painting and animation. They are the co-host of the podcast Art and Labor, which chronicles the stories of social justice organizing within the art world and advocates for fair labor practices for artists, museum workers, art handlers, interns, and anyone traditionally overworked and underpaid in the field. Their solo exhibition FIREWATER is on view at JDJ through December.