Artists with developmental disabilities have produced a wealthy archive of community-driven artwork for the reason that founding of Inventive Progress, 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 Middle in Richmond, California, transmutes the signifiers discovered on the covers of artwork magazines and books into work that pulse along 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 utility 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 linked natural traces. 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 kinds 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 using flat, lengthy purposes of paint to extract particular colours from the dancing sky. Whereas sure works function a staccato of black traces in opposition to a white rectangle within the nook — an exaggerated rendering of a barcode — this similar aspect 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 photographs 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 energy of the exhibition’s set up, I sense a curatorial hesitancy to clarify statements on the artist’s work, mockingly 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 US writ massive marginalize these with disabilities, or handle how incapacity generates creativity. This would possibly mirror the lack of know-how in crucial incapacity concept 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 Middle, 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 Road, Midtown Manhattan) by April 20.
