Nancy Toomey Fine Art is pleased to announce an exhibition of works by Monica Lundy titled The Curse of Eve on view from October 29 to December 13, 2025. The gallery is located inside San Francisco’s Minnesota Street Project, 1275 Minnesota Street. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 12pm to 4pm, and by appointment–please contact nancy@nancytoomeyfineart.com or 415-307-9038.
The public is invited to meet artist Monica Lundy at the gallery on Saturday, November 1, from 5pm to 7pm.
In The Curse of Eve at Nancy Toomey Fine Art, Monica Lundy presents a series of portrait paintings in which she explores feminine archetypes. Lundy’s artwork is inspired, in part, by psychologist Carl Jung’s concept of inherited patterns of thought including primal imagery and character types that arise from the collective unconscious, spanning across culture and time. These easily recognizable images can be found throughout mythology, ancient literature, and fairy tales, and still resonate to this day.
The exhibition’s title references a passage in the Bible where God cursed Eve after she indulged in the forbidden fruit, ensuring that womankind would suffer increased pain during childbirth and subservience, as a reminder of their inherent sinful nature. Much of Lundy’s work in this show is informed by principal Jungian feminine archetypes such as the mother, maiden, lover, mystic, and queen, as well as derivations such as seductress, sacred whore, rebel, and wild woman.
Conceptually, the idea of archetypal patterning led Lundy to work with visual patterning to render these portraits. She meditatively paints each dot while contemplating texture, color relationships, color theory, and how this relates to painters who have come before her, and to art history in general. “I find myself reflecting on my time during my undergraduate studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago,” says Lundy, “where I would pass days in the museum galleries of the Post-Impressionists and Neo-Impressionists, marveling at pointillism and the vibrant color palettes and textures of master painters such as Seurat, Signac, and Van Gogh. I am also inspired by the vibrancy of Pop Art and how artists such as Warhol, Lichtenstein, and Polke also implemented the use of different dot patterns in unique ways.”
Lundy is most interested in the technique she employs to further amplify the contrast between surface texture and the image one sees from a distance. Up close to the surface, the painting becomes completely abstracted, breaking apart into a series of brightly colored dots. Yet, the farther away one stands, the more the image coalesces; so much so that when the painting is seen through the screen of a personal device, it resembles a photograph reminiscent of traditional newsprint.
“I find the notion of this drastic difference in perception thrilling,” says Lundy. “I revel in both the meditative process of mixing colors and painting one dot at a time, as well as the surprise of standing back and discovering the image that emerges. This notion of different levels of visual perception alludes to a broader philosophical idea of how something observed from afar can be deceptively different than when we dare to take a closer look.”
Monica Lundy (b.1974, Portland, OR.) is an Italian-American artist whose paintings and installations are best known for portraiture, focussing on female narratives throughout history. Her work is known for its implementation of both experimental, non-traditional and traditional painting methods and techniques, as well as for the extensive research she conducts to find her subject matter. The source material she uses for her paintings and installations are based on research conducted on-site in archives, museums and libraries around the world, online databases, as well as photos gathered from friends and family. Her painting technique incorporates a range of media, including terra cotta clay, liquid porcelain, rusted steel, paper, coffee, pyrography, gouache, oil and acrylic paint. Lundy’s site-specific installations have been mounted in many unusual venues, including Alcatraz Island and Fort Point (Golden Gate National Park, San Francisco); The British Film Institute (London); Laboratory of the Mind Museum (a museum housed within the historic, decommissioned psychiatric hospital Santa Maria della Pietà in Rome); and the historic Chinotto Neri Factory (Rome).
Lundy’s work can be found in the collections of the Lowe Art Museum (Miami, FL), Taubman Museum of Art (Roanoke, VA), Mills College Art Museum (Oakland, CA), Laboratory of the Mind Museum (Rome, Italy), Montalvo Arts Center (Saratoga, CA) and The Battery SF (San Francisco, CA).
Lundy has received various accolades, including an artist residency at the American Academy in Rome (2017), a Lucas Artist Fellowship at Montalvo Arts Center (2015), an Irvine Fellowship (2015), a San Francisco Arts Commission Grant (2015), and the Jay DeFeo Prize in painting (2010). She holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1996) and an MFA from Mills College (2010). Her work has been featured in Vanity Fair Italy, ARTNews, The Huffington Post, PBS NewsHour, KQED Arts, Hyperallergic, and Visual Art Source, among other publications. She is the subject of Monica Lundy, a monograph published by Silvana Editoriale in Milan (2022), featuring texts by four distinguished authors, with a lead essay by Dorothy Moss, then chief curator of painting and sculpture at the National Portrait Gallery (Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.).
Lundy currently lives and works in Los Angeles and Rome. The Curse of Eve is her third solo exhibition at Nancy Toomey Fine Art.
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