LOS ANGELES, CA.- parrasch heijnen presents Ground for Assumptions, the gallery’s first solo exhibition with Los Angeles-based painter Kristy Luck (b. 1985, Woodstock, IL).

Kristy Luck’s images exist within their own field of knowledge, mapping re-formed memories and locating false endings. Luck sublimates the impulse to define what one sees, creating organically surrealistic scenes and forms – blurred, shifted, and interrupted – painting traces of recognizable elements of the material world.

In Ground for Assumptions, Luck purposefully uses recurring motifs in their work, such as the egg, or an ancestral bracelet clasp to construct hints or strings of imagery in conversation with each other. The artist obscures, halts, and alters these initial shapes and forms, inventing a new lineage through layers of pigment, erasure, and shifts in orientation, defining fresh symbols within echoes. Painting for Luck allows an ongoing genesis, and therefore, an ongoing existence, a familiar language that thrives in ambiguity, but not without mourning that which was interrupted.

Invoking the question of the absent element, or one that is just beginning to appear, the artist’s desire is to create uncertainty around an object challenges the notion of a fixed existence and a recognition of the constraints of language as a construct. As Luck describes, “Sometimes the painting is ahead of the viewer, possibly having more information than the viewer is aware of, almost as if the paintings exist before or after the moment but are never of the moment.”

Luck’s ongoing exploration of the instability of language versus experience and image stems from the ambiguity of their family history. Luck’s mother was one of the vast numbers of Native Americans who survived the Sixties Scoop.[1] Although they know their maternal lineage is from the Navajo Nation, broken connections and missing records have left an indelibly incomplete picture.

In Ground for Assumptions, Luck continues their ongoing investigation of identity, and honors instability, building a history of personal traces to create new recognition. In Luck’s process, the fissures of understanding are not meant to be fixed, but rather expanded, increasing their volume and their intensifying color, serving as a poetic bridge connecting place and self.

Kristy Luck received their BFA from Rockford University (Rockford, IL) in 2010 and their MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago, IL) in 2014. Luck’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Franklin Parrasch Gallery (New York, NY), Philip Martin Gallery (Los Angeles, CA); Mendes Wood DM (São Paulo, Brazil), and ODD ARK LA (Los Angeles, CA). Luck’s work has been included in group shows at Robilant+Voena (New York, NY and Milan, IT); Marin MOCA (San Rafael, CA); Sidecar (Los Angeles, CA); GRIMM (New York, NY); Analog Diary (Beacon, NY); Torrance Art Museum (Torrance, CA); Corbett vs. Dempsey (Chicago, IL); and Projet Pangée (Montreal, Canada). Kristy Luck lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. They are featured in the Hammer biennial, Made in L.A. 2025, October 5, 2025 - March 1, 2026. Kristy Luck is represented by parrasch heijnen, Los Angeles.

Kristy Luck: Ground for Assumptions will be on view at parrasch heijnen, 1326 S. Boyle Avenue, Los Angeles, from October 11 - November 8, 2025.


[1] A generation of Native American children who were forcibly removed from their biological families in the 1960s and placed with non-First Nations carers as an act of forced assimilation by the U.S. government before the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978.