COL is pleased to announce “Lily Alice Baker: Risk of Delight” opening November 21st. Baker’s paintings explore the body as a site of emotional excess, awkwardness, and improvisation. Her work began in the charged social spaces of pubs and clubs—settings where bodies perform, spill, and collide—but has since shifted inward, towards more intimate terrain. These new paintings sit with feeling: the kind that lingers, contradicts itself, or defies language. Baker is interested in what it means to be close and still feel far away, to perform identity while not fully believing in it, to desire connection while guarding against it.
Baker’s earlier work focused on the choreography of social ritual—especially within pub culture, where masculinity is allowed to break down under the influence of alcohol, but other bodies remain scrutinised, objectified, or excluded. The pub, in Baker’s world, becomes a stage where stoicism cracks and vulnerability leaks out, but only within culturally sanctioned limits. Her paintings question what it means to be present in a space that was never designed for you, and what forms of performance, protection, or fantasy must be deployed just to belong.
Her practice often begins with a felt sense of dislocation. The figures in her work—sometimes legible, sometimes abstracted—float, teeter, collapse. They act out inner states that are contingent and unresolved: grief, longing, shame, desire. At times they are romantic, ridiculous, dead serious—or all of these sentiments at once. She paints a kind of seriousness that fails, not in critique, but as an honest reflection of what it means to feel deeply in a world that often demands detachment.
Gestural and improvisational, Baker’s painting is deeply informed by the legacy of Abstract Expressionism. She draws from its physicality, while rejecting its mythologies of mastery and heroic individualism. Her approach subverts this legacy through a deliberate embrace of emotional intensity and chromatic excess. As theorist David Batchelor writes in “Chromophobia,” color has long been associated with the feminine, the decorative, the unserious. Baker reclaims these qualities as strengths. In her hands, color becomes a refusal: of detachment, of hierarchy, of shame.
The use of oil paint is integral to her process. Its softness, slippage, and sensuality mirrors the emotional qualities she explores—feelings that don’t resolve cleanly but instead sit in tension, contradiction, or flux. Her figures are intuitive and improvisational, often caught between becoming and falling apart. These are not heroic bodies; they are human ones—honest and trying.
Ultimately, these works are about people trying to be close to one another, and not always succeeding. They’re about the body—what it reveals, what it hides, how it performs, and what happens when that performance breaks down. Lily Alice Baker’s practice is about giving form to what we’re often told not to express: vulnerability, failure, sentimentality, tenderness. Her paintings blur the line between the real and the fantastical, between past trauma and imagined futures. They ask what it means to truly be seen—and what it costs to show yourself fully.
