Artists with developmental disabilities have produced a wealthy archive of community-driven artwork because the founding of Artistic Development, a pioneering heart devoted to such creators in Oakland, California, in 1974. Half a century later, the Museum of Fashionable Artwork is dedicating a solo exhibition to an artist from these studios for the primary time. Marlon Mullen, who has labored for many years at NIAD Artwork Heart in Richmond, California, transmutes the signifiers discovered on the covers of artwork magazines and books into work that pulse together with his singular imaginative and prescient.
Recognizing Mullen’s referents is vital to his work’ preliminary pull — the Artforum emblem, as an example, or Warhol’s Marilyn, whose expression is playfully exaggerated right here. However the artist’s thick paint software provides texture lacking from the largely two-dimensional referents, lending his works a extra human high quality. Mullen, as an example, replaces a 2002 Artwork in America cowl with a two-by-three grid of Bernd and Hilla Becher’s black-and-white images of inflexible framework homes with a community of related natural strains. In doing so, Mullen eviscerates the logic of the unique artworks, in addition to that of the covers on which they’re reproduced through misspellings and the rearranging of letters and layouts. Germany turns into “Grmany”; an “R” and a “T” fuse right into a form harking back to the Pi image. White borders that neatly separated the Becher homes disappear as Mullen’s rendition smushes them collectively.
Marlon Mullen, “Untitled” (2017), acrylic on canvas. 30 1/4 x 30 1/4 inches (76.8 x 76.8 cm)
Every portray sees Mullen reacting in real-time to the varieties he’s producing, revealing the main points that him within the act of constructing. Mullen’s tackle Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” (1889), drawn from the duvet of a MoMA publication, is marked by extra emphatic brushstrokes than the unique and the usage of flat, lengthy functions of paint to extract particular colours from the dancing sky. Whereas sure works characteristic a staccato of black strains towards a white rectangle within the nook — an exaggerated rendering of a barcode — this similar factor is absent in different work. Within the above work, the artist even omits MoMA’s emblem within the nook of his reference, denying the supply’s intention. But these photos can by no means wholly be divorced from their inspirations, forcing us to ponder Mullen’s perspective in dialogue with artwork historical past.
Regardless of the power of the exhibition’s set up, I sense a curatorial hesitancy to clarify statements on the artist’s work, satirically distancing him from the interpretive rigor afforded different artists. Whereas gallery didactics present important context, they by no means probe how museum collections and the USA writ massive marginalize these with disabilities, or deal with how incapacity generates creativity. This would possibly mirror the lack of information in crucial incapacity idea in museum curatorial departments, a spot that may very well be closed by inviting exterior curators and students. But Mullen’s work rises above these issues of their sincerity and originality — an argument in itself for a extra capacious consideration of incapacity and artwork.
Marlon Mullen, “Untitled” (2024), acrylic on canvas, 48 x 40 inches (121.9 x 101.6 cm) (picture by Chris Grunder; courtesy the artist, NIAD Artwork Heart, and Adams and Ollman)
Marlon Mullen, “Untitled” (2018), acrylic on linen, 36 x 26 inches (91.4 x 66 cm) (picture by Charles Benton)
Tasks: Marlon Mullen continues on the Museum of Fashionable Artwork (11 West 53rd Avenue, Midtown Manhattan) via April 20.
