The paintings by American artist Lizzy Lunday (b. 1992, Kansas City, KS) distort the boundaries between the real and the artificial to address the precariousness of intimacy. Combining images from the media and her personal archives, the artist’s compositions foreground what happens when the strange and the familiar collide. Bold coloration destabilizes the already haunting scenes while urgent painterly gestures highlight the relationships between the figures. Set within dream-like environments, Lunday’s figures are captured in moments of intimacy pricked by the threat of complications and idealizations. Exploring the space between tender and territorial, Lunday’s paintings speak to the disconnect of mediated, idealized intimacy and its often awkward, inarticulable lived experience.

Lizzy Lunday completed her BA at the University of Miami, before acquiring an MA in Fine Arts at Pratt in 2019.