LUCY COPPER
Visual artist. Born 1993 in Delaware, USA. Based in Malmo, Sweden.
Lucy Copper is an American artist based in Malmö. In her painting practice she draws from her education in observational painting to create works that are broadly figurative. She works equally from observation and from imagination, letting a given set of motifs come together to form cryptic and suspenseful narratives. She is interested in drawing connections between the real and unreal, and in using depictions of artifice in everyday settings as a meditation on the illusionistic nature of painting and our image-saturated culture broadly.
The paintings in this body of work respond to gothic and renaissance depictions of walled gardens, wherein the garden represents paradise as neatly separated from the wilderness outside; the landscape as an abstraction of itself. The walls in these paintings take a range of visual forms, manifesting as layers of mediated imagery built one upon another to create worlds within worlds. The paintings’ subjects, often animals, find themselves confined by their surroundings, which are themselves abstractions, cobbled together from renaissance paintings and video game landscapes. The imagery is composed and layered such that one landscape obscures another, creating confusion as to which represents the real and which the ideal, or if indeed there is such a distinction.
Copper received her MFA in 2019 from the University of Washington in Seattle. Her awards include an individual artist grant from the Elizabeth Greenshields foundation and her work is represented in the collections of the University of Washington and the Mt. Gretna School of Art, among others.
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EXHIBITIONS
Crossroads
2026.10.10 – 2026.11.15