Lizzy Lunday

Public Displays of Affectation

04.02.2023 - 05.13.2023

Jupiter Contemporary is pleased to present Public Displays of Affectation, a solo exhibition of new work by Brooklyn-based artist Lizzy Lunday, whose brightly hued canvases draw upon imagery from reality TV, social media, the artist’s iPhone photos, and occasionally art history to mine the tensions and contrived expressions that result from the performance of intimacy as spectacle.

Two individuals look on in apparent boredom from a sofa in Good Form (2023), for example, while a man bench presses a woman in a bikini and another woman crouches, sorority-style in a body-con dress. Here, the disaffected couple serves as an admittedly humorous foil to the conceit of the painting, as the other figures relish in heteronormative displays of gendered stereotypes, asking, if not begging, to be admired for their “good form.” 

Lunday’s manipulations of the source imagery—and her practice of continually repainting and erasing sections of her compositions—engenders a tension between positive and negative space, as objects and body parts alike often either dissolve into nothingness or fuze with their background. In Another Kissing Contest (2023)—wherein a man bends over a woman in a hollywoods-style kiss while three other onlookers exclaim loudly, mouths wide open—one woman’s outstretched hand blends into another man’s shoulder, his hair takes on the color of the sunset behind him, and a second woman appears to have lost her lower half. And yet, these oddities don’t detract from the believability of the scene at hand. If anything, they serve to reinforce the drama by highlighting which gestures and expressions contribute to the plot while cutting those which aren’t integral to its furtherance—a practice seemingly akin to that of a video editor cutting together raw footage of the individuals on Love Island in an effort to create a cohesive narrative with character arcs, budding romance, and of course public displays of affec(ta)tion.