Lizzy Lunday

Lizzy Lunday’s paintings are built around how people look at one another and what happens when they are seen. Using the compositional logic of classical painting, she stages scenes that are easy to enter but difficult to pin down. Figures gather, watch, touch, and test one another, yet meaning never fully coalesces. It moves between bodies rather than settling into a single narrative. The work focuses on what it means to be visible now, and what that visibility demands.

Lunday’s practice grows out of postwar American painting’s long engagement with celebrity. Where earlier painters treated celebrity as spectacle and myth, and later turned it inward toward private experience, Lunday addresses myth under a different condition altogether: a world of constant, largely self-generated visibility, staged celebrity, and performed intimacy. In response, she paints figures that aren’t portraits or symbols, but roles (performers, witnesses, instigators) caught between control and exposure. They function less as individuals than as part of a shared choreography. Power shifts subtly from one body to another. Attention matters. Arrangement carries narrative force, but myth no longer arrives as belief or destiny. It operates as performance, as roleplay slips free of consequence and spectacle becomes ambient.