Lucy Crump creates paintings that don’t quite behave.

 

Her interiors are staged and slightly wrong. Perspective tightens, frames repeat within frames, and figures sit or stand with a heightened awareness of the space around them. The compositions appear composed at first glance, yet something in their balance feels unsettled, as though steadiness were being maintained rather than secured.

 

Crump’s work turns on this pressure. She is interested in how control is constructed and how it begins to strain, how a room contains a body and how that body holds itself in response. Some figures meet the viewer directly, others withdraw, but none seem entirely at ease. Their composure carries tension. The space both steadies and exposes them.

 

That tension continues across the surface. Drawing remains visible within oil and acrylic; charcoal interrupts colour; edges are revised and left exposed. The painting does not conceal its decisions. Instead, it carries them forward, building authority through adjustment rather than erasure.

 

In recent works, this instability extends into the physical structure of the painting itself. Magnetic elements embedded within the canvas allow parts of the composition to shift, so that what appears fixed can be altered and rebalanced. Nothing stays settled for long.

 

Crump’s paintings hold together under visible pressure. Stability is not assumed. It is made, tested, and never entirely secure.

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