ILY2 is proud to present Dear Martin, a presentation of works from the 1970s to the 1990s by the New York-based artist Bonnie Lucas. This solo exhibition is Lucas’ second with the gallery and will be on view at ILY2 New York from September 14 through November 1, 2025, with an opening reception on Sunday, September 14 from 12:00 to 2:00 PM.
For nearly fifty years, Bonnie Lucas has transformed mass-produced consumer goods into uncanny meditations on traditional femininity and its base undercurrents. Overwhelming mountains of costume jewelry, knockoff toys, and plastic trinkets reveal the enduring qualities of cheapness—not only as it pertains to the material itself, but to the sociocultural information coded into it, the clandestine desire for girls to be innocent and sensual at the same time, forever. Evocative of a place between a Barbie dreamhouse and a landfill nightmare, the works are unexpected and introspective, discomforting and ornate, and always complex.
In the early 1980s, Martin Hason of Avenue B Gallery in the East Village gave Lucas her first string of solo shows. During this period, the art market was inhospitable to women artists—especially those whose subjects were femininity and sexuality and utilized craft approaches. Her assemblages, collages, and sculptural paintings were on the receiving end of sexist criticism; Lucas’ sharp perception and remarkable material literacy often mistaken for unserious crudeness. Hason, however, recognized the transgressive beauty in her work ahead of the mainstream art market, finding a place for her compositions on his gallery walls and in his own collection.
Presented in 2025, Dear Martin, traces the relational dimensions of Lucas’ practice from its beginnings with Avenue B and follows the evolution of her oeuvre through the later 20th century. Spanning decades, the works on view demonstrate progression while maintaining a coherent visual throughline. Among them are selections from a previously unseen Untitled series in muted shades of white. These understated abstractions laid the foundation for the colorful, elaborate works for which Lucas is known: chaotic strata of monochromatic bedsheets, buttons, unspooled necklaces, and undergarments evoke a bodily revealing, or coming across a discarded bag of a little girl’s things. This gestural uncovering signals a darker understanding of femininity and domesticity, how everyday objects contain the feminized body as something both sordid and coveted, thereby shaping one’s sexualized self-image and interiority. Elsewhere, an earlier series of beaded works on grid paper show the genesis of Lucas’ attunement to line—dense but ordered, contemplative—and her deft management of color. Tiny pieces of hobby supplies are meticulously placed in serpentine, geometric arrangements. Though compact, the compositions are closely considered; lines move in all directions but subtly accord with the formal logic of the paper’s grids. Far from a minimalist’s canvas, the grid works are a key entrypoint into Lucas’ later career, characterized by an ability to create harmony from discount bin junk.
Lucas’ Dear Martin, opens after a successful solo presentation at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2024, and before an institutional exhibition at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum. Today, growing audiences see what Hason saw in Lucas over four decades ago—a rare drive to assert her own autonomy—and a vision that resonates across generations. Lucas’ art embraces unresolvable tensions and contradictory pleasures, speaking directly to what the queer underground has always known about living and making art in a harshly conformist world. At 75 years old, she has lived a true artist’s life, steadfast in her aesthetic commitments that defy trends and slant towards unambiguous commentary. Dear Martin beckons Lucas into 2025 while honoring the past, as two friends meet again in a New York gallery.
