Lucy Bull

Lucy Bull was born in 1990 in New York. She began undergraduate studies in painting at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2008, then transferred to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she earned her BFA in painting in 2012. After graduating she returned to New York before relocating to Los Angeles, where she has lived and worked since around 2014. She now splits her time between Los Angeles and New York.

Bull's paintings are built from dense, gestural layers of oil paint that suggest fire, water, foliage, and other natural phenomena without resolving into legible imagery, and she frequently titles individual canvases with numerical timestamps, such as 16:10, 18:50, 9:59, and 13:13. Early solo exhibitions at High Art in Paris and Arles, Human Resources, and Smart Objects in Los Angeles built her reputation through the late 2010s. Skunk Grove at David Kordansky Gallery's Los Angeles space in 2021 and Piper at the gallery's New York location in 2022 broadened her audience, and by 2023 her work had appeared in solo presentations at The Warehouse in Dallas and the Long Museum West Bund in Shanghai, alongside a group inclusion in the NGV Triennial in Melbourne. In 2024, ICA Miami organized The Garden of Forking Paths, her first U.S. museum survey, which ran into 2025 and included a stairwell commission on view through September 2025. She continues to be represented by David Kordansky Gallery.

Coverage of Bull's work tends to focus on its physical intensity: the paintings are frequently described as immersive and hallucinatory, built through repeated, almost obsessive layering that critics connect to bodily and psychedelic experience rather than to a single art-historical lineage. Art press attention through 2023 and 2024 increasingly treated her market itself as a story, tracking successive record-breaking sales alongside her museum debut at ICA Miami as evidence of an artist moving simultaneously through institutional and commercial validation. No single critical framework has yet dominated the writing on her work; the recurring thread is a fascination with process and surface over legible subject matter.

Bull's secondary market accelerated sharply through 2023 and 2024. Flash Chamber, a 2020 painting, set a then-record of roughly USD 1.7 million at Sotheby's Hong Kong in October 2023. That record was surpassed in May 2024 when 16:10 sold at Sotheby's New York for a hammer price of about USD 1.45 million, roughly USD 1.8 million with fees, in the Now Evening Auction. Her current auction high is 18:50, which sold for HKD 18,500,000, approximately USD 2.4 million, at Christie's Hong Kong in September 2024 (an exact sale day is not documented in public auction records). Demand has also shown up outside Asia: 9:59 and 10:00 both sold at Sotheby's London for hammer prices in the range of GBP 900,000 to 1.3 million. Third-party market data aggregator HENI has reported cumulative auction turnover of roughly USD 28 million over a trailing seven-year window, with close to USD 11 million of that in the most recent two years, an unusually compressed rise for a painter still in her mid-thirties.

Bull's market is young, and her auction history is short relative to the scale of recent prices, with successive records set within about a year of one another and heavily weighted toward evening sales in Hong Kong and New York. There is no catalogue raisonne, which is typical for a living artist this early in her career, and works are best verified through her gallery relationship rather than an independent authentication board. Collectors should treat any single auction result as a data point in a still-forming market rather than a stable benchmark, and should watch whether recent price gains are sustained across a broader and more geographically diverse pool of buyers.