Lot 11 – Lindsey Bull – Purple Dress

About  

Lindsey Bull’s paintings depict a curious cross-section of people – they often seem lonely, melancholy, shy and introverted, as if trying to avoid our gaze or to distance themselves from the world. But they are also often eccentric, gregarious characters who enjoy their subcultural affiliations and live out inner fantasies through their outward appearance – dressing up in unusual clothes or fancy dress, unorthodox hats, over-the-top make-up, way-out hair. It is a bohemian cast, an eclectic community of outsiders and auteurs, interlopers and introverts, waifs and strays, dandies and extroverts. 

While Bull is interested in the image, the fashions, the look of such individuals and groups, it is equally their inner lives that she is trying to capture – like an uninvited portrait painter for tortured romantic souls, an observer of those who fall outside the mainstream. A posture, a glance, just a moment captured that gives something away about her subjects’ states of mind, their personalities, their psychologies – these are the momentary revelatory flashes that Bull immortalizes in paint. Such haunting and affecting epiphanies are the interface between the inner and outer lives of her subjects, the intersection of repression and expression, of self and other. 

Bull’s naturally modish, lo-fi use of paint is characterised by an edgy ethereality – light and otherworldly, sometimes almost ghostly. This is morose painting with a touch of modern-day mysticism, an ode to outsiders, and an unassuming expose of people’s private love of fashion, especially when it is not the kind of fashion to which society wants us to conform. 

Education 

2009 

MA Fine Art, Chelsea College of Art and Design 

2007 

Postgraduate Diploma Fine Art, Chelsea College of Art and Design 

2001 

BA (Hons) Fine Art, Manchester School of Art  

Solo Exhibitions 

2023 

Into the Night, Bo Lee and Workman, Somerset  

2022 

Mirror, Huddersfield Art Gallery 

Posture, All city, New York 

Camouflage, Bo Lee Gallery, London, UK 

Dressing Up, Bo Lee Gallery, London, UK 

Group Exhibitions 

2024 

Figurative Impressions: Interwoven perspectives  

Apéritif [apeʁitif], Palazzo Monti, Italy  

2023 

Group show, Hioco Delaney, Antwerp, Belgium 

2022 

Love is the devil, Malborough gallery, London, UK  

Two Rooms: Lindsey Bull and Will Cruickshank, Bo Lee and Workman, Bruton, Somerset 

The Power to Dream, Hussenot Gallery, Paris, France