Lucy Wilner
Lucy Wilner · Source: New York Artists Circle · Rights retained by the original rights holders
- Medium
- Acrylic Paint
- Practice
- Painting
Lucy Wilner is a lifelong artist whose work has been shown nationally in both group and solo shows, at venues such as the Bellevue Art Museum, the Seattle Art Museum and, in New York, at galleries such as the Painting Ce… Full biography
Biography
Lucy Wilner is a lifelong artist whose work has been shown nationally in both group and solo shows, at venues such as the Bellevue Art Museum, the Seattle Art Museum and, in New York, at galleries such as the Painting Center, the Woodward Gallery and Denise Bibro Fine Art. Her most recent solo show was presented by the New York City Parks Department at Conference House Park in 2017.
Wilner’s professional career started at the University of Chicago where she earned her BFA in studio art, specializing in stone lithography. She followed that with an MFA in painting from the University of Washington in Seattle.
During the heyday of Pop Art and Minimalism, Wilner found a different path, exploring themes that demanded observation and attention to detail. Tropical motifs, narrative and political content occupied her and found ultimate expression in her painting Monkeyshines, which was a two-year project, purchased by the Seattle Art Museum.
Wilner continued to paint narratives throughout the eighties, placing figures in situations in which objects and spaces had evocative or symbolic associations. In the nineties, she turned to still life subjects. Those paintings were completely realistic, but unconventional, focusing on complex, unstructured arrangements of fabric or clothing. She was represented first by the Lynn McAllister Gallery and later by the Kimzey-Miller Gallery, and had solo shows at both venues.
Wilner added graphic design to her repertoire in the mid-nineties. She had an ideal first job at that time, enjoying total creative freedom as the art director of a regional tabloid art magazine. Part of the fun was making covers in Photoshop. After moving to New York, she worked in publishing as a book designer. Wilner continues to love type and text and now often layers graphic motifs and text into her paintings.
Lucy Wilner’s work is both representational and conceptual. She seeks a sense of universality through focus on images that are particular and specific. The result is the creation of virtual worlds that are at once objective and mysterious.
Artist statement
I am motivated by the ambition to create a comprehensive kind of painting, one in which any particular image can be incorporated, without its being out of place. I also want my painting to seem convincingly three-dimensional, despite including several or many different spaces. And finally, I want it to have a kind of vastness or universality—in other words, for it to be, through the use of symbols and referents that enlarge its scope, a virtual cosmos.
