Lucy Maki is an American artist currently living in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She has exhibited throughout the United States and also in Canada and Mexico. Her paintings are in the NM Museum of Art in Santa Fe, the Albuquerque Museum, the University of NM Art Museum and numerous private collections. Simultaneously with her solo exhibition Eccentric Geometries at Exhibit 208, her work is in the 2024 Arts Thrive show at the Albuquerque Museum.  In 2022, she participated in Southwest Contemporary’s 12 New Mexico Artists to Know Now at Pie Projects in Santa Fe.  She has also shown work at the Painting Center in New York in the group show Juxtapositions.  Selected publications include: Southwest Contemporary’s 2022 Field Guide, Trend Magazine, Spring 2015, and New American Paintings Western Edition, Volumes #36 and #18.  Over the years, she has had 16 solo exhibitions, including one in NYC at Linda Durham Contemporary Art which was reviewed in the publication Art News.  She earned an MFA with distinction from the University of New Mexico.

Maki’s work ranges in scale from large mixed media shaped canvases to small constructions and collage paintings. Investigations of color, materiality, pattern, and space are central to the work’s visual appeal. Architectural thought organizes the inside/outside pictorial space, while gestures of modernist painting and design define the surface.  Materials—wood, aluminum plate, collage, ApoxieSculpt, Roll-a-Tex, canvas and various acrylic media, as well as an undetermined process, factor in and are essential to the schematics of the painting.

Works become puzzles to be interpreted as the painting progresses and is completed. By noticing, feeling the interactions between shape, color, line, brushwork, texture, an ordered sequence mysteriously emerges that makes the painting’s structure cohere. Abstraction, as geometric imagery, is used to convey thoughts regarding processes of illusion and perception. Behind the facade of a strong visual appeal, which is often associated with the decorative, there may emerge (or may not) questions, comments, and wordplays regarding how one sees and interprets knowledge, reality, existence…seriously or with fun.