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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Love also paints networked fields allowing the vast range of characters to associate in surprising and profound ways.

Angels are vehicles for one of Love’s most interesting and enduring inventions - a symbolic head composed of connected figures.

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 (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.