Shannon Cartier Lucy

Shannon Cartier Lucy was born in 1977 in Nashville, Tennessee, where she currently lives and works. Active for over twenty years, her painterly practice is marked by continuous experimentation and is now widely recognized as one of the most significant voices in contemporary figurative painting. Raised in a complex and unconventional family environment, shaped by the presence of a father affected by schizophrenia, Cartier Lucy creates paintings that depict scenes which appear ordinary and familiar at first glance. Disturbing details, unnatural postures, and unconventional compositional choices, however, introduce a sense of estrangement that destabilizes the viewer’s perception. Within her work, the body becomes a central tool of investigation. Figures—often faceless—inhabit domestic spaces charged with melancholy, solitude, and a quiet, underlying tension. Their actions oscillate between the familiar and the unsettling, giving rise to situations that are at once seductive and disturbing. What initially appears known gradually transforms into an entry point to more ambiguous narrative layers, where information overlaps and contradicts itself. Cartier Lucy introduces impossible scenarios and uncanny atmospheres that, over time, take on the status of a new normality within her practice. Her painting can be read both as a visual translation of interior states and as a reflection of a disoriented society, permeated by contradictory stimuli and a continuous flow of hallucinatory images and meanings, revealing a fragile and unstable cultural landscape.