“Projects: Marlon Mullen” through April 20, 2025
Museum of Modern Art | 11 West 53rd
Studiously enlarged renderings of art magazines become strangely lyrical, sumptuously flat compositions. Barcodes and stripes of text—freed from their prosaic functions—appear as surprising rhythmic moments in fields of thickly applied acrylic color. In Marlon Mullen’s first major institutional solo exhibition, on view in the Museum of Modern Art’s lobby-level Projects gallery, 25 canvases from the past 10 years vibrate with his signature appeal. Though the paintings are varied, unpredictably translated from their sources, radically modified according to no discernible formula, Mullen’s unfailing, inimitable style is instantly recognizable.
In anticipation of the show, the California painter visited the museum last year, spending hours in the collection galleries. After, MoMA sent him more than two dozen of its publications; the books joined Mullen’s archive of material at the NIAD Art Center, the progressive studio for artists with developmental disabilities that has been his creative base for some four decades. (The organization's acronym stands for "Nurturing Independence through Artistic Development.") But, for the most part, Mullen has preferred to work from the covers of periodicals. Artforum, with its square format and blocky typographical logo, seems to lend itself particularly well to the artist’s interpretations.
An untitled work from 2017, which is drawn from an issue featuring an image by Kerry James Marshall, is a brightened and distilled version of the original, transforming its subject (a man, painting with an enormous palette, who meets the viewer’s gaze) into solid-hued puzzle pieces. Another painting, from last year, is inspired by a 1997 cover—a photograph by Rineke Dijkstra in which a teen wearing a chartreuse bathing suit has the ocean at her back. Mullen shifts the composition’s proportions, shrinking Dijkstra’s model and expanding the background’s stretch of sky and water, filling it with a gluey transparent blue that highlights his brushwork.
Great care is taken with the paintings’ edges; some more recent works feature Mullen’s version of the source publication’s printed spine—a treatment that suggests he’s interested in reproducing objects as well as their printed designs. And so, the installation of 14 works in a sweeping salon-style arrangement, towering far over visitors’ heads, isn’t ideal. Though their graphic force holds up from afar (such as in the fantastic white square that reads, simply, in squished-together black text, “The world of Picasso”), the paintings—with their textured, built-up surfaces—are better experienced up close.
Two stand-out works, both luckily installed at a comfortable viewing distance, include a 2023 canvas that reduces a 2012 “year in review” issue of Frieze to a monochrome. (You can compare it to its vintage source, displayed in a vitrine.) Mullen delineates the text subtractively, with gray paint contracting around the yellow and black serif font. In the other, his sole selection from his MoMA haul, the artist captures a detail of The Starry Night as seen on the museum’s book devoted to the legendary 1889 Van Gogh in its collection. Mullen’s take is collagelike, simplified, but his raised shapes echo the Dutch artist’s impasto whorls.
Speaking of merch, Mullen wears both a MoMA T-shirt and a sweatshirt in a short documentary that plays in the exhibition. At first, I thought it was a little weird—the prominence of the museum’s branding as well the presence and expository nature of the film itself. But it’s beautiful: Footage of Mullen at work in the NIAD studio is presented untrammeled by voiceover. It’s a window into the organization’s community and mission, and it allows the methodical process of an almost entirely nonverbal artist to speak for itself.
Mullen is not a newcomer to exhibiting (I first encountered his paintings years ago, at the now-closed downtown gallery JTT, and he is currently represented in New York by Bridget Donahue), but his current exhibition is the first of its kind by a developmentally disabled artist at MoMA. Things are changing: A decade or so ago, it struck me as particularly notable that the outdated construct of the outsider artist was eroded so poetically by his paintings’ insider references—now, that seems like old news. Here, at the hallowed institution, Mullen’s choice of source material takes its place among the equally, or more important, formal decisions responsible for the startling radiance and sense of conviction that defines his work.
