Dino Matt and Marlon Mullen
Adams and Ollman
January 12 through February 24, 2018
Opening reception: Friday, January 12th from 6—8PM
EXHIBITION INFORMATION
Adams and Ollman is thrilled to announce a two-person exhibition featuring the work of Marlon Mullen and Dino Matt that will start off our 2018 programming.
On view in Mullen’s second exhibition with the gallery will be a range of the artist's colorful paintings with bold, graphic, interlocking shapes and swirls of tactile paint that reference text, advertisements and reproductions of artworks found in magazines and books from the library at Nurturing Independence Through Artistic Development (NIAD) in Richmond, California where Mullen has worked for many years. In his paintings, that read as modernist abstractions, the referent–whether it be a James Turrell light installation or Kate Hudson on the cover of Marie Claire magazine–is distilled, transformed and edited, often beyond recognition. While they withhold vital information, the paintings have a perseverance of legibility as they toggle between representation and abstraction or isolate a particularly poetic grouping of words.
Dino Matt, for his debut exhibition with the gallery, has created a group of hand-built ceramic sculptures, each an accumulation of hundreds of gestures or fragments of stoneware. Existing between form and function, Matt’s sculptures suggest vases or vessels, but upend the notion of traditional craft with references to the avant-garde and the absurd. With their fragmented surfaces marked by holes and their emphasis on the raw materials and evocative color, the small-scale sculptures reveal the artist's visual and conceptual interests as explored through clay. While the sculptures have a contemporary archaeology aesthetic, where shards of pottery might be dug up and history pieced together, the works are also reminiscent of brushwork in an abstract painting or assemblage, where tangled parts resolve into an expressionist structure.