Marlon Mullen uses text and images from art magazines and publications as points of departure for compositions that are entirely his own. His innovation ranges from spotlighting the vital information from a magazine spread to prioritizing easily overlooked details. Key to his works is the freedom to distort and transform the text and visual elements so that his paintings open up new compositional spaces and ways of looking. Mullen has been described as “a strong formalist” who “paints precise shapes in bold swirls of vivid colors, creating topographical pools of paint and confident graphic lines.”
Mullen began his artistic career working at NIAD, a progressive art studio in Richmond, California, in 1986. While Mullen has had no formal art school training, he started out drawing and printmaking at NIAD, where he is surrounded by fellow artists every day. Essential to his practice is the studio’s library, where Mullen often finds inspiration for his paintings, as well as his relationships with studio facilitators, some of whom he has worked alongside for decades. “Mullen’s work is a contemporary exemplar of a centuries-old tradition of artists making art about art, an avenue of invention richly evident in MoMA’s collection,” Ann Temkin, MoMA’s chief curator of Painting and Sculpture, said. “Taking the covers of art books and magazines as his subject matter, Mullen transforms them into dazzling paintings that bring him and us into the thick of today’s art world.”
Mullen paints the canvas flat on a table, starting with details. After each small shape is crafted, he moves on to progressively larger forms, finishing by unifying the background. Mullen 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.
Untitled (2017) showcases Mullen’s creative manipulation from source material to canvas. Using the cover of an Artforum magazine featuring Kerry James Marshall’s painting Untitled (2008), Mullen pulls and stretches the subject to create an anatomy all his own. A figure with a triangular head, round pink eyes and mouth, and wearing a beige jacket over a pink and yellow geometric shirt centers the painting. The magazine logo shines in white in the top left corner, unevenly rounded compared to the publication’s font. Other abstracted elements and lines and organic shapes fill the background. Mullen’s brushstrokes are visible throughout the painting, in thick coatings of acrylic paint or sheer brush lines. Untitled (2016) uses a book cover surveying the life and career of Pablo Picasso, published in 1967 and titled The World of Picasso, as its source. Mullen paints the publication title slightly off center, embraced by the swirling gray background. The clean printed font morphs into looser letter forms, emphasizing the hand of the artist. A square canvas reconfigures the rectangular cover. “Much like any great composer or choreographer or alchemist, Marlon allows the material to shapeshift,” the artist Sable Elyse Smith says of Mullen’s process, so that “text becomes space and shape becomes text and body and other.”
Emma Jaromin, Coordinator, Access Programs and Initiatives, and Theresa Rodewald, Associate Educator, Access Programs and Initiatives, 2024
