Danica Lundy’s paintings can be understood as discrete systems of inquiry. Often rooted in first-person embodied experience, they begin with gestures or encounters, which become vehicles for the examination of wider social, cultural, and political systems. Through her elaborate and layered iconography, everyday activities – such as putting a coin into a vending machine, exercising, or ordering food at a drive-through – are dissected and estranged, both revealing and problematising the invisible structures that underpin them. For Lundy, form follows the logic of a ‘gritty, real, lived, complicated experience.’ Her resulting visual language enacts a Cubist-like simultaneity: bodies, objects, and environments are shown from multiple, shifting viewpoints, troubling distinctions between interior and exterior, organic matter, and mechanical forms.
Lundy has described the initial impetus for each composition as a ‘framework or armature to hang the painting on,’ one that sets in motion ‘a new set of questions in every direction.’ She approaches painting as an exploratory process, negotiating the physical qualities of the medium and the confines of the frame as active elements of the work. Her canvases are dense, turbulent fields in which bodies are opened up, hollowed out, and severed, often colliding with architectural elements, technological devices, surgical tools, or sporting equipment. Recurring motifs – such as bandages, tampons, scissors, condoms, and cables – appear across her surfaces, forming visual circuits that link the corporeal with the detritus of everyday life. Although her process begins with a preliminary drawing, she makes most decisions on the canvas, embracing change and the possibility of failure as generative forces.
The revelations of Lundy’s panoptic, X-ray-like vision are ideological as much as they are physical. Next in Line (2025), for example, arose from a routine visit to a pharmacy to collect a prescription for her young daughter. Lundy’s painting transforms this seemingly innocuous task – one in which ‘you exchange something that can help you get better for money’ – into ‘a kind of public, visual autopsy of a dysfunctional healthcare system.’ At the centre of the composition, two hands converge, their fingers gripping a reflective credit card: a point of contact that recalls the iconic meeting of fingers in Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam (c.1508–12). Yet where that divine touch once conferred life, Lundy’s version instead binds health to capital. In the centre of the painting, a sealed paper bag reveals its insides: a pill bottle that seems to glow with an elixir-like seduction. The female figure’s body is rendered with similar transparency, her ribcage, spine, and pelvis merging with the exposed machinations and structures of the pharmacy counter. Lundy likens this mode of working to semantic satiation, a phenomenon in which the repetition of a word or phrase causes it to temporarily lose its meaning: ‘The hope for me is if I spend enough time on a small, everyday thing, try to visually splay it open, it will unfold, deconstruct, combust, lose its meaning and create space where meaning can be built back up in a different way.’
For Lundy, anatomical and often abject motifs are a way to engage with subject matter that is inherently unrepresentable. ‘In some ways, the medium of painting is good for representing the inside of your body because the inside of your body is fluid. It’s in flux, it’s all gunk and goo. But also, we live in our bodies every day and so seldom see what’s in there – that it seems like a very fruitful place for inquiry.’ Indeed, many of Lundy’s figures are shown undergoing treatment or intervention, caught within institutional or interpersonal dynamics that exceed their control. In House of Pain (2025), a young athlete is tended to by her coach. Her leg, resembling a hunk of meat pared down to the bone, rests in his lap, her foot jammed into his crotch. The coach pulls a strip of medical tape – executed in a literal thin ‘pull’ of paint – offering an almost comically inadequate form of medical attention. An oversized pair of scissors threatens to shear through flesh, fabric, and trust alike. Informed by the artist’s experiences as a teenage athlete, the work probes complex power dynamics, in which frameworks of care are shaped by authority, vulnerability, and control.
Lundy’s pictorial space recalls an exploded diagram of consciousness, in which observation, memory, metaphor, and lived sensation are presented all at once. ‘I’m explicitly working against something like photography – something that can provide a reliable, objective single moment,’ she explains. ‘I’m trying to make an image that can only be created in paint.’ This approach is evident in Chamber (2022), which the artist has described as a ‘Pietà through an exploding camera’. Made following the death of her father, who was a photographer for a local newspaper during her childhood, the composition is framed by disassembled camera parts. A circular aperture reveals a man reclining in a hospital bed, cradled by two young women. A plethora of hands, arms, legs, and feet merge with cogs, screws, springs, and wires – the latter indistinguishable as either part of the camera apparatus or medical equipment. In the top right-hand corner, two large fingers seem to grab the scene, as if pressing the photographic shutter in attempt to capture the uncapturable: the moment of passing from life to death.
Throughout Lundy’s vocabulary, paint takes on the visceral qualities of the body, functioning as muscle, sweat, bone, and nerve. For the artist, paint is ‘the vehicle and the language’, a means of communication that is both ‘taken in and given on a bodily level’. While she describes drawing as a ‘way of figuring things out’, painting is a ‘freestyle’ mode that responds to instinct, rhythm and physical presence. This malleable language allows her to transform familiar and seemingly banal activities into forums for interrogation. Although Lundy’s paintings are replete with brutal acts of exposure – prising open, cleaving, peeling, dissecting – they also sustain a quieter, more insistent inquiry. Her work lingers, presses, and complicates; itself a chaotic system marked by glitches, evolutions, and unpredictable tensions between bodies, paint, and the human condition.
Danica Lundy (b.1991, Salt Spring Island, Canada) lives and works in Connecticut. She received her BFA from Mount Allison University, Sackville, NB, and completed her MFA at the New York Academy of Art, where she concentrated on painting and was awarded the Leipzig International Art Programme Residency and the Chubb Post-Graduate Fellowship. A three-time Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant recipient, Lundy has exhibited internationally, with two solo exhibitions at White Cube, London – ‘Boombox’ (2024) and ‘Stop Bath’ (2022). She has participated in group exhibitions at institutions such as the Hall Art Foundation, Kunstmuseum Schloss Derneburg, Germany; the Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas; the Flag Art Foundation, New York; the New York Academy of Art’s Wilkinson Gallery; Spinnerei, Leipzig, Germany; Sotheby’s, New York; and Owens Art Gallery, Mount Allison University, Sackville, Canada. Her work is held in the public collections of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Art Gallery of Ontario, Canada; Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, Italy; Dallas Museum of Art, Texas; Denver Art Museum, Colorado; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; the Hall Art Foundation, Vermont; Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas; Centre of International Contemporary Art Vancouver, Canada; and Contemporary Art Foundation, Japan.
