An exhibition of new paintings by Danica Lundy
White Cube is pleased to present ‘Boombox’, an exhibition of new paintings by Danica Lundy. In her second exhibition with the gallery, the artist explores structures of power and how these inform and determine the fabric of the everyday – their influence over our bodies, our relationships and how they permeate our industries and social strata. Lundy’s detail-laden, panoptical compositions draw on daily events, subjecting them to the scrutiny of an augmented lens. Employing shifting perspectives, merging images and manipulating proportions, a poetic framework for these typically quotidian scenes emerges in which the familiar makes room for the uncanny.
Often listening to music while she works, Lundy describes how ‘music logic’ underpins the rhythmic orchestration of the image, while also providing the point of departure for the exhibition as a whole. ‘A dozen songs (or paintings) made to fit and flow together can do something really dimensional and intangible’, she explains. ‘A good album is a little time machine; it starts playing and you can taste and hear and smell the place you were the first time it came on. Every time you listen you bring to it a changed version of yourself and get to find new meaning.’
Starting with a rudimentary vision – what she calls a ‘mind-made structure’ – Lundy’s paintings evolve from detailed drawings into improvisational and gestural brushwork. Developing, in some instances, into highly realistic passages and in others into a predominantly expressionistic painterly language, her images oscillate between revealing and concealing their subject and intention. As suggested by the exhibition’s title, ‘Boombox’, the paintings locate themselves at the ‘border between what’s inside and what’s outside’. The threshold of the body (or the machine) serves as structural framework, albeit one that is porous and penetrable, beyond which the external world inundates with a cacophony of sounds, sights and smells.
As writer and art critic Justin Paton describes: ‘Lundy deploys the wet language of oil paint to get at the content (and discontent) she’s chasing. In her hands, painting is an audaciously refreshed technology for seeing into the world – a way of peeling back the skin of rooms, cars and bodies and fearlessly pushing in’. (Justin Paton, 2023).
Further Information: Danica Lundy | White Cube