The Museum of Modern Art Presents- Projects: Marlon Mullen

The Museum of Modern Art announces Projects: Marlon Mullen. There is no mistaking the work of Marlon Mullen. His distinctive paintings, with their lush surfaces and bold color, extend the long-standing tradition of making art about art. Projects: Marlon Mullen is the first solo exhibition of the artist’s work by a major museum and will be on view in the Museum’s free, street-level Projects gallery.

For nearly 40 years, Mullen has been based at the NIAD Art Center, a progressive art studio for artists with developmental disabilities in his native Richmond, California. Donated issues of art publications, such as Art in America and Artforum, serve as his primary subject matter. Projects: Marlon Mullen presents a selection of the artist’s paintings from the past decade.

Upon selecting a glossy cover or an interior page as a point of departure, Mullen paints using acrylic on canvas, flat on a table. He maintains visual ties to his source material, while also radically transforming it. The resulting compositions reimagine the relationships among their parts. Barcodes and other details may zoom into prominence. Letters, numbers, punctuation, and the spacing between them may disappear or repeat. Imagery and graphics all become pure form to be reordered and reshaped. As this exhibition demonstrates, Mullen views magazines and art books not only as a prompt to create, but also as an invitation to engage with today’s art world on his own painterly terms.