Katherine Bradford
Marlon Mullen

Press

Frieze
Katherine Bradford Sees Mothers and Children in Paint
Daniel Gerwin and Katherine Bradford
March 9, 2023

W Magazine
Katherine Bradford’s Long and Winding Road
Laura van Straaten
July 20, 2022

Bomb
Artists in Conversation: Katherine Bradford
Samuel Jablon
October 12, 2016

Press

Vulture
Marlon Mullen’s Anomalous Translations
Jerry Saltz
February 2023

The New Yorker
Marlon Mullen
Johanna Fateman
January 21, 2023

Artforum
Marlon Mullen
Sasha Frere-Jones
April 2019

The figures in Katherine Bradford’s paintings are informed by their surroundings—bodies of water, the night sky, or fields of color populated with abstract shapes and forms. Against these spaces that Bradford so skillfully creates, the artist’s subjects assert themselves as places of imagination or introspection as well as sites to consider gender, politics, sexuality, and, sometimes very simply, the nature of paint. Deftly employing color and form in the service of energy and emotion, Bradford offers the viewer hints at narrative, subjects, or feelings—to reorganize and rework in order to create new meanings. The archetypal figures—mothers, dreamers, superheroes—that appear throughout her work allow us to consider the human condition in all of its faults and beauty, joy and pain.

Katherine Bradford (b. 1942, New York, NY) has received a Guggenheim Award and a Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship as well as two awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her work was the subject of a solo museum survey, The Flying Woman, which opened at the Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME in 2022 and traveled to the Frye Art Museum, Seattle, WA. She has had solo shows at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth, TX and the Hall Foundation, Reading, VT. Bradford has been featured in group shows at the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS; the fourth Prospect New Orleans Triennial, New Orleans, LA; MoMA PS1, New York, NY; and the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY. In 2017–2018, she was Senior Critic on the faculty of the Yale School of Art. In 2021, she created five permanent large-scale mosaic murals for the MTA’s First Avenue L Station in New York City. Her work is included in collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; the Brooklyn Museum, New York, NY; the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; the Frye Art Museum, Seattle, WA; the Menil Collection, Houston, TX; the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS; and the Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR, among others.

Marlon Mullen’s kaleidoscopic paintings feature interlocking shapes of tactile paint that reference images found in art magazines from the library at Nurturing Independence Through Artistic Development (NIAD) in Richmond, California, a progressive art studio that supports the creative endeavors of artists with disabilities. On view at Paris Internationale is a series of recently completed works that reference iconic Artforum and Frieze magazine covers. A strong formalist, Mullen paints precise shapes in bold swirls of vivid colors, creating topographical pools of paint and confident graphic lines that delineate forms that had formerly served to make an image. As he distills and reconstructs his references, the paintings come to withhold what one might consider vital information, prioritizing previously minor or overlooked details. With his uniquely rigorous manner of organizing the picture plane, Mullen upsets the expected hierarchy of elements in an image. Shadows move out from the background into the fore, stripes of a magazine barcode enlarge to become graphic scaffolding that provide movement and depth, while text is abstracted into imagery that performs an aesthetic or poetic function. On Mullen’s surfaces, the components are liberated from any purpose other than generating composition, gesture, and rhythm. Amidst these radical transmutations, the artist creates his own idiosyncratic universe that toggles gloriously between representation and abstraction.

Marlon Mullen (b. 1963, Richmond, CA) lives in Rodeo, California. He has had solo exhibitions at Atlanta Contemporary, Atlanta, GA and White Columns, New York, NY. His work has been included in group exhibitions including the 2019 SECA Art Award exhibition, SFMOMA, San Francisco, CA; The Whitney Biennial 2019, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Way Bay 2 and Create, the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), Berkeley, CA; Affinity, the Museum of Northern California Art, Chico, CA; Under Another Name, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY. Mullen received the 2014 Wynn Newhouse Award. His work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art and The Museum of Modern Art, both New York, NY; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; and the Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR. He has worked at Nurturing Independence through Artistic Development (NIAD) in Richmond, CA since 1985.

Adams and Ollman exhibits and promotes contemporary art as well as historical works by self-taught artists of the 20th century. The gallery’s exhibitions seek to radically expand the discourse around contemporary art, bringing together a wide range of artistic practices, from self-taught masterworks to material culture to contemporary works in a variety of media. The gallery was founded in 2013 in Portland, Oregon.

Katherine Bradford
Mariel Capanna
James Castle
Vaginal Davis
Joy Feasley
Jessica Jackson Hutchins
Kinke Kooi
Jennifer Levonian
Rob Lyon
Ryan McLaughlin
Marlon Mullen
Joan Nelson
Todd Norsten
Conny Purtill
Will Rawls
Paul Swenbeck
Stefanie Victor