Lucia Love paints icons of public power and worship on deliciously unstable ground.
In these works, we see some of history’s most static representations experience revelatory psychic breaks through vibratory colors and collisions of deftly painted surfaces.
Installation View, Lucia Love: Angel at the Wheel, JDJ Tribeca, New York, NY, 2022
Lucia Love
Saint George and The Dragon, 2022
Oil on canvas
72 x 48 in
Lucia Love
Angel at The Wheel, 2022
Oil on canvas
48 x 72 in
The resulting works reveal a decidedly 21st century discourse about the fluid, malleable nature of truth, and history. Within that rupture, Love paints epic struggles between the individual and the collective.
Lucia Love, Capitalist Enchantment, 2022
Gouache, ink, watercolor, pencil
12 x 16 in
From the linear perspective of the Renaissance, to cubism of the early Modern era, visionary artists have captured the zeitgeist in the handling of painted space.
Lucia Love, The Moth, 2022, Gouache, ink, watercolor, pencil
12 x 16 in
Installation View, Lucia Love: Angel at the Wheel, JDJ Tribeca, New York, NY, 2022
The figures in Love’s paintings are amalgamated bodies, often balancing on impossible podiums or floating in broken geometries that defy perspectival logic. Love captures the instability of moral ground in our time of global peril.
Lucia Love
Night and Day, 2022
Oil on canvas
36 x 72 in
Chiseled gods with aspirational abs, marbled seraphim, military leaders, soviet kitsch, tarot, occult symbology, and biblical allegories are just some of the array of references commingling within Love’s paintings.
Lucia Love
BDW , 2021
Oil on linen
30 x 40 in
Lucia Love, The 4 Living Creatures 4, 2022 Gouache, ink, watercolor, pencil
12 x 16 in
Love also paints networked fields allowing the vast range of characters to associate in surprising and profound ways.
Lucia Love
Fair Haven, 2017
Oil on canvas
72 x 60 in
Installation View, Lucia Love: Angel at the Wheel, JDJ Tribeca, New York, NY, 2022
Angels are vehicles for one of Love’s most interesting and enduring inventions - a symbolic head composed of connected figures.
Lucia Love
Excelsior, 2021
Oil on canvas
48 x 60 in
This human chain is sometimes doubled when the circle of figures literally share minds with mirrored counterparts.
At times this form also resembles a crown. Like a powerful talisman, these beings in Love’s paintings become apotropaic forces to uphold and carry forth the magical power of connection and community.
- Emily Mae Smith
Lucia Love
Delicate Touch, 2021
Oil on panel
48 x 36 in
Installation View, Lucia Love: Angel at the Wheel, JDJ Tribeca, New York, NY, 2022
Lucia Love (b. 1988, New York, NY, lives and works in NY) attended the School of Visual Arts on a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, where they studied painting and animation. They are a co-host of the Art and Labor podcast, where they chronicles the stories of social justice organizing within the arts. Art and Labor focuses on the human cost of 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.