Lucy Kim is an American painter and sculptor born in Seoul, Korea, and raised between Korea, Myanmar, and the United States. She incorporates plastic casts of people, animals, and objects into her paintings, often distorting the recognizable by manipulating the materials during the mold-making and casting process. She developed this method as a way to combine the representational lineage and plasticity of painting with indexical representations of the people and objects around her. The visceral distortions are attempts at creating a physical link between the image and its subject, where more often than not the literalness leads to eerie humor.
Kim received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2001 and her MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2007. She attended the Yale Summer School of Art and Music, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, MacDowell, and is the recipient of the Carol Schlosberg Memorial Prize and the Ellen Battell Stoeckel Fellowship from Yale. Her work has been exhibited at Lisa Cooley, Flash Art NY, Regina Rex, Ortega y Gasset Projects, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Field Projects, Wassaic Project, and others. Recent press includes The Boston Globe, Big Red & Shiny, and Kaleidoscope.
Kim is a founding member of the collaborative kijidome, and is currently lecturer in fine arts at Brandeis University. She lives and works in Massachusetts and is represented by Lisa Cooley.
