Danica Lundy’s Stop Bath at White Cube by Molly Hunloke

‘I want a painting to be able to read like a poem or a nightmare, to evoke a young lifetime’s worth of cultural gunk, great paintings, friction, disillusionment, jubilation, heartache… I want a painting that I can be totally consumed by…’ – Danica Lundy

Stop Bath, Danica Lundy’s first solo exhibition in London features a kaleidoscope of monumental paintings made in early 2022. Lundy’s deep visceral images really are a feast for the eyes. She describes her paintings as a ‘hyper-reality that shows everything at once’, a sensory experience so overwhelming it took deliberate mental fortitude to be able to confidently digest what was being shown. Lundy cites metaphysical poets like John Donne as an influence on her work. To quote Donne, she leaves ‘each little room an everywhere’ in her work.[1]

Romancing the sink (2022). Oil on canvas. 183 x 122 cm. Courtesy of White Cube

Looking at her biography on the White Cube website, the term “colliding realities” really hits the nail on the head.[2] A pretty flawless way to describe her work and one that brings to mind a brilliant description in the second book of the ‘hard’ science fiction series The Three-Body Problem. The passage illustrates what seeing in four dimensions would be like, something which is quite unfathomable to humans. However, the author Liu Cixin gets as close as Lundy does in conjuring and depicting that experience.

“If the three-dimensional world were likened to a picture, all he had seen before was just a narrow view from the side: a line. Only from four-dimensional space could he see the picture as a whole. He would describe it this way: Nothing blocked whatever was placed behind it. Even the interiors of sealed spaces were laid open. This seemed a simple change, but when the world was displayed this way, the visual effect was utterly stunning. When all barriers and concealments were stripped away, and everything was exposed, the amount of information entering the viewer’s eyes was hundreds of millions of times greater than when he was in three-dimensional space. The brain could not even process so much information right away.”[3]

This passage is emotionally uncanny as to what it is like to stand in front of Lundy’s work, especially how she opens up spaces randomly across the canvas to look from the foreground literally through the figures and forms. Muscles straining and tensing beneath the skin, keys and coins jangling in a denim pocket and cross sections of a kitchen sink complete with piping and bunged up drains. Like casting an X-ray on her subject, she illuminates what is beneath the surface without discarding said surface. This double sight of seeing through the layers of her subject takes work and constant readjustment. Looking at her work is like doing brain training in the most enjoyable way.

It takes immense technical skill to demonstrate this level of visual information and still make it seem like organised chaos. For her hard work Lundy equally deserves a viewer who will use their own brain power to attempt to make sense of it all.

Danica Lundy (b. 1991, Salt Spring, Canada) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She received her BFA from Mount Allison University, Sackville, 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 solo shows in Canada, Italy, Germany, and the United States. Her work is in the public collections of Dallas Museum of Art, Institute of Contemporary Art Miami and Sydney Modern Project, New South Wales.

[1] Donne, J. 1983. The Good Morrow. The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 3rd Edition.

[2] White Cube., 2022. Danica Lundy. [online] Whitecube.com. Available at: https://www.whitecube.com/artists/artist/Danica_Lundy

[3] Liu, C. (2021). The Dark Forest. (J. Martinsen, Trans.). Head of Zeus, an AdAstra Book. 

Stop Bath by Danica Lundy is on view at White Cube Bermondsey until the 11th September 2022.

https://whitecube.com/exhibitions/exhibition/danica_lundy_white_cube_bermondsey