Kristy Luck

Floral, terrene, celestial and human elements coalesce to form otherworldly realms in Kristy Luck’s paintings suffused with mysterious symbolism. Evoking subconscious vistas, the Los Angeles artist’s scenes are reminiscent of abstract landscapes by Modernist painters such as Arthur Dove, Georgia O’Keeffe, Florence Miller Pierce and Agnes Pelton. The latter two were members of the Transcendental Painting Group, a 1938-1942 movement in New Mexico whose aim was “to carry painting beyond the appearance of the physical world through new concepts of space, color, light and design, to imaginative worlds that are idealistic and spiritual.” Luck’s ethos appears similar; but instead of idealism, her paintings’ tenor is one of brooding introspection. In Overthinker (2019, pictured above), a headless body lies aglow as though on a pyre above a patterned valley intermeshed with a protuberance resembling a snake-necked turtle with a human face. Other paintings evoke teeth erupting as cinder cones, tornadoes storming across meditative meadows, pitchers filling giant hands, and wavy lines meandering like riverbeds in the sky. Each of these compositions seems imbued with idiosyncratic significance that remains tantalizingly open to viewers’ speculation.