Bonnie Lucas has built a compelling body of work, ranging from intimately scaled paintings to painstakingly constructed mixed-media assemblages, exploring the psychological minefields of childhood, femininity, and domesticity. This exhibition, which was Lucas’s first solo show in New York in over a decade, focused on two series of collages by the artist—one from the ’90s and one from 2010—that evoke, in her words, the “sensual, beautiful delights and the strange pain of growing up a girl or boy.”

Part figural, part abstract, Bonnie’s collages are built out of images from books or magazines and fragments of paintings and drawings by the artist as well as her students, and are often punctuated by objects such as thread, painted wooden skewers, and artifical flowers. Fueled by a fascination with, and clear attraction to, kitsch imagery and leavened with a dark sense of humor, Lucas’s collages brilliantly employ sentimentalized representations of children and women to reveal their deeper, darker undercurrents. As critic Julie Caniglia wrote about the artist’s work in 1995, “As much as Lucas points to the violence and chaos swirling in the heads of little and big girls everywhere, she—in both product and process—also embodies their irrepressible curiosity, resilience, and ingenuity.”

Bonnie once remarked, “I always want to discover new ways of telling a story.” Viewed side by side, these two series, created nearly two decades apart, offered an unprecedented opportunity to chart Lucas’s formal and conceptual development while revealing the depth and consistency of her layered, borderline-obsessive vision of the dark continent of childhood.

An opening reception for Bonnie took place on March 29, 2011.