Marlon Mullen

White Columns is proud to present the first New York solo exhibition by the Bay Area-based artist Marlon Mullen.

Marlon Mullen works at the celebrated National Institute of Art & Disabilities Art Center (NIAD) in Richmond, California. NIAD is one of three visionary Bay Area organizations, along with Creative Growth (Oakland) and Creativity Explored (San Francisco) that were originally founded by Elias Katz and Florence Ludins-Katz in the early 1970s. The centers provide services, support and studio facilities to communities of adult artists with mental, developmental and physical disabilities.

Over the past seven years White Columns has collaborated extensively with artists associated with Creative Growth, presenting their work in solo exhibitions and group shows in New York, Los Angeles, Berlin, Paris, and elsewhere. This is our first collaboration with NIAD.

Mullen’s paintings are based on found photographic images, which the artist uses a departure point for his subsequent work. In the process of developing a painting Mullen’s photographic sources typically become obscured, or literally abstracted, where an image is subsequently reduced to a graphic schema of interlocking colors and forms. Operating at the threshold between legibility and illegibility Mullen’s works appear to operate with the multiple and overlapping histories of twentieth century modernism, whilst steadfastly remaining highly idiosyncratic.

For his White Columns exhibition Mullen will present a discrete group of recent acrylic paintings on both canvas and board.

Mullen’s work was recently included in the ICI travelling exhibition “Create”, co-curated by Larry Rinder and Matthew Higgs, that opened at the Berkeley Art Museum in 2011. His work was also included in the widely celebrated 2011 exhibition “After Shelley Duval ’72 (Frogs On The High Line)” curated by Bjarne Melgaard for Maccarone, New York.

For more information contact: info@whitecolumns.org