Franklin Parrasch Gallery is pleased to present One time, one time, one time..., the gallery’s first solo exhibition with Los Angeles-based painter Kristy Luck (b. 1985, Woodstock, IL). 

At once dynamic and organic, Kristy Luck’s paintings embody the rich, transcendent component of the artist’s practice: surrealism viewed through the lens of spiritual abstraction. Luck’s luscious yet restrained palette and measured brush strokes in this new body of work reference the artist’s inward gaze — a deep inner probing interrogating meaning and figuration. The questions they posit in the small-scale paintings that comprise this show relate to the constrictions and limits of time, space, and boundaries. Luck performs a sort of invagination as a consideration of the interior of scale — the folding in of a surface into itself to form a hostile and safe as a vessel for exploration.  

One of Luck’s vague allusions, while discussing their work with mora méndez, is the vulva and vaginal form as perhaps a way of producing a high-friction thinking space. These are openings and false endings that make language and concepts provisional illuminations — always in transformation. Another gesture the artist examines is the act of moving away from the landscape as a genre and subtracting its built-in compass. Each work in this series is untitled — or named Untitled — a paradoxical act that was also considered in the exchange between painter and writer as a refusal to give in to an overdetermination that could offer a distraction from the disorientation they intend. “Untitling” hopefully liberates the interactions between meaning and form. 

Ambiguity of connection with their own heritage (Luck’s mother was one of a vast number of Navajo children torn from their homes in the 1960s and placed with non-First Nations adoptive parents – in her case with a family in rural northern Illinois where Luck then grew up), is a through line in this body of work as it manifests itself in the questioning of biological understanding. Their family’s fragmented and fractured history is inevitably woven in the artist’s work as they question identity and meaning. 

“I hope that the experience of my work is like, as soon as you start to apply words to it, you realize how you’re limiting yourself,” Luck notes. When you look at something and you start to try and name it, it becomes attached to a thought, which [then] becomes attached to a hierarchy.”1 

Kristy Luck received their BFA from Rockford University (Rockford, IL) and their MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago, IL). Luck’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Philip Martin Gallery (Los Angeles, CA); Mendes Wood DM (São Paulo, Brazil) and ODD ARK LA (Los Angeles, CA). Additionally, their work has been included in group shows at Sidecar (Los Angeles, CA); GRIMM (New York, NY); Analog Diary (Beacon, NY); Torrance Art Museum (Torrance, CA); Marin Museum of Contemporary Art (Novato, CA); Corbett vs. Dempsey (Chicago, IL); and Projet Pangée (Montreal, Canada). Luck's work has been featured in numerous publications including Artforum, Art in America, Los Angeles Times, Architectural Digest, Artillery Magazine, The Editorial Magazine, and Opening Ceremony. Kristy Luck lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. 

1 Luck, Kristy. Artist in Residence – Kristy Luck. Swill Magazine, Issue 5, 2024