Danica Lundy at Magenta Plains

Artist: Danica Lundy

Exhibition title: Three Hole Punch

Venue: Magenta Plains, New York, US

Date: February 5 – March 10, 2022

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Magenta Plains, New York

Magenta Plains is pleased to present Brooklyn-based painter Danica Lundy’s first New York solo exhibition. With an eye for the melding of the figural and the mechanical, Lundy offers the human body as a site for visual experimentation. She constructs intricate scenes of adolescent memory, layering muscular and improvisational brushwork to emphasize the precarity of a transitory time. Caught in uncanny set pieces saturated with familiar emotions, the viewer is granted access to hybrid, embodied perspectives.

Teetering between ecstasy and panic, her figures move through teen film tropes with a gruesome, tragicomical edge. The sudden awareness of one’s own body which comes with puberty is transposed here into an anatomical awareness; openings from foreground to background cut through flesh. Bones and wounds feature prominently in these paintings. In this way, Lundy makes an explicit connection between emotional uncertainty and bodily discomfort, and in turn transforms the confusing, powerful desires of youth into observable physical phenomena.

With a cinematic sense, Lundy builds paintings which are both highly theatrical and concerned with exposing their own artifice. The interlocking of compositional elements acts as a map for her pictorial strategy. Lines of connection, attachment, and significance are revealed as multiple levels of each painting become clear. Lundy is an engineer as much as she is a painter; each work contains power lines crackling with narrative energy.

Installation view, Danica Lundy: Three Hole Punch, Magenta Plains, New York, NY 2022

Danica Lundy, U of u, 2021, Oil on canvas, 96h x 75.25w x 1.50d in. Photography by Shark Senesac. Courtesy of the Artist and Super Dakota, Brussels

Installation view, Danica Lundy: Three Hole Punch, Magenta Plains, New York, NY 2022

Danica Lundy, Spark up, gas down, 2021, Oil on canvas, 96h x 144w x 1.50d in.

Danica Lundy, Spark up, gas down, 2021, Oil on canvas, 96h x 144w x 1.50d in.

Danica Lundy, Spark up, gas down, 2021, Oil on canvas, 96h x 144w x 1.50d in.

Danica Lundy, Spark up, gas down, 2021, Oil on canvas, 96h x 144w x 1.50d in.

Danica Lundy, Ferry ride, 2021, Oil on canvas, 96h x 72.25w x 1.50d in. Photography by Shark Senesac. Courtesy of the Artist and Super Dakota, Brussels

Installation view, Danica Lundy: Three Hole Punch, Magenta Plains, New York, NY 2022

Installation view, Danica Lundy: Three Hole Punch, Magenta Plains, New York, NY 2022

Danica Lundy, Peggy cries softly, 2021, Oil on canvas, 60h x 60w x 1.50d in. Photography by Shark Senesac. Courtesy of the Artist and Super Dakota, Brussels

Danica Lundy, Compressions, 2021, Oil on canvas, 72h x 96w x 1.50d in. Photography by Shark Senesac. Courtesy of the Artist and Super Dakota, Brussels

Installation view, Danica Lundy: Three Hole Punch, Magenta Plains, New York, NY 2022

Installation view, Danica Lundy: Three Hole Punch, Magenta Plains, New York, NY 2022

Danica Lundy, Kissing cavity, 2021, Oil on canvas, 72h x 48w x 1.50d in. Photography by Shark Senesac. Courtesy of the Artist and Super Dakota, Brussels

Installation view, Danica Lundy: Three Hole Punch, Magenta Plains, New York, NY 2022

Danica Lundy, Inspiration of the poet, 2021, Oil on canvas, 74h x 48w x 1.50d in. Photography by Shark Senesac. Courtesy of the Artist, Super Dakota, Brussels and Collection of Sydney Modern, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Australia. Gift of Raul Danon, 2021