Lily Bunney: girls peeing on cars

Guts Gallery and miłość present the first solo exhibition by British artist Lily Bunney, ‘girls peeing on cars’. It is the first of two presentations of Lily Bunney’s work as a collaboration between the galleries, with the second part to open at miłość in November. 

‘Girls peeing on cars’ is an expression of reverence for friendship, with the exhibition being an homage not just to the concepts of closeness, communion, mutual support and celebration, but also to Lily’s actual friends. Lily speaks of narrating her life through friendship, with her adulthood being an exploration of comfort evolving from close personal relationships. 

She calls it an awakening, a feeling of security and carelessness, of being held, found in friendship. The events in the exhibition all happen during one night out – the key moments inflated in scale, while the smaller works provide context and set the environment with a germinating familiarity of queerness and girlhood.

In this body of work, Lily Bunney re-contextualises found digital imagery of girls peeing on cars and scenes of expressions of friendship and communion, and turns them into pointillist watercolour paintings. The series started with her creating large-scale paintings of girls peeing on cars, which accompanied her fiction writing on experiences of queer community building in the context of nightlife, and then extended towards smaller-scale works around friendship, feelings of belonging, and tactile intimacy. Lily completes the body of work with photographs of herself and her friends ‘developed’ as gem art, with tiny plastic diamonds forming scenes of celebration and everyday interactions between friends, in the style she describes as ‘earnest tackiness’. 

The exhibition is curated by Aleksandra Moraś, the director of miłość gallery and Lily Bunney’s friend.