Lucie Gray is a painter of consummate female rage and liberation. Set in a bright and heady palette, Gray’s paintings depict wide-eyed women splintered and seized between different worlds of rancour, power, hunger, and peace. Each painted woman looms large, contorted in exertion within the frame and dripping in food and heat and colour: she wills the viewer to see the whole of her. 

Gray paints complete performances. The female character is the narrative through-line connecting each painting to the next, driving forward the combined uprising and nourishment of female evolution. Deeply and increasingly autobiographical, Gray’s painted women represent both joyful and painful conversations with herself and the many hungering, wishful, prodigal characters she plays in alternate storylines.

Gray gives each figure different tools and luxuries for hedonism. Some devour or destroy decedent food with industrial precision. Others simmer, undressed and undone in slippery and dizzying heat. More still wield oversized knives or hammers to smash, beat, cut, destroy any expectation for a confined or muted life with absolute completeness.

Each of Gray’s works are born from a clear, discrete flash of an image, the totality of the painting she wants to create presenting itself to her. The painting process is then an oft laboured, sometimes tortuous, process of reproduction and problem-solving to replicate the image in her mind. This produces paintings that offer painstaking clarity in mark-making, icons, colour, and form. It is notable, too, that Gray paints in her home studio, imbuing her work with the simultaneous warmth, restrictions, and latent rebellion of her domestic reality.