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Quitters: BRIDGET MULLEN

Past exhibition
25 March - 30 April 2022
  • Press release
  • Works
  • Installation Views
  • Publications
Press release

Nathalie Karg Gallery is pleased to present Quitters, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Bridget Mullen. This will be Mullen’s first presentation with the gallery.

 

You begin with everything squeezing, bulging, marching, mirroring, hovering, shapeshifting,  being and becoming hair. The scene is uncannily familiar but, dreamlike, it eludes a  definitive locating act. An ambiguous black shape becomes steeple, becomes appendage,  becomes peaked collared trenchcoat—which compresses two breast-cheeks together and  bisects an eye so it becomes two. In another painting, you know it’s not dog-headed twins  in tight red jumpsuits that lost boots while trapped in fun-house mirrors, though you can’t  help but see it that way over and over. 

Mullen’s paintings deal in things that are too easy to see and too easy to name, and too  hard to see and too hard to name. They are about ambiguity as it runs into expectations  and assumptions. Sometimes they are hard-to-place, other times overt. They are not dark,  but they are uncompromising and challenging, the product of a steady gaze into our inner  world and the world of the painting itself. Yet they always have a sense of elegance and  ease—made just so out of the necessity of forcing figures to comply formally with moves  that came before. They are pressurized by their range—sometimes uncomfortable, sometimes suggestive, sometimes humorous, sometimes grotesque—and as they present  an excavation of one interior, they sound the depths of ours.  

By design and necessity, each step in Mullen’s painting process is unforeseen; she doesn’t  sketch beforehand, she actively works to hold space for each move to be a kind of natural  and intuitive outgrowth of its ground in that moment—both the ground of the artwork itself  and the ground of her interior world. The process verges on oracular and it requires trust. A  given painting can have many lives and take many years to complete. The goal is that each emergent move, and eventually the painting itself, be as unique and self-sufficient as  possible, such that it can “hold itself.” 

 

Mullen’s paintings hold off naming in favor of a wavering space. They bear the traits of a  life-long conversation between friends wherein space is held in the middle, allowing a new  language to form, special only to the two. They shirk resolution for perpetual  responsiveness: posing new questions, sharing a further insight, making a new joke. Lively  and evasive, they operate prepositionally: in response to, in dialog with, alongside of. They  are full of half-full symbols—things that can accommodate another name, whose  shimmering, polyvalent reality only emerges with time. And so they gently prod us for a  prolonged viewing experience that mirrors the searching and patient waiting required in  their making. We are asked to trust the painting, abide by it, and hold space for it to unfold. 

This brings us to quitting. A quitter holds their own in the face of something else: the status  quo, the past, external expectations—like assumptions about how to see, or how to think.  A quitter says “no” to something while being in the thick of it. Mullen’s paintings, like the  quitter of the team, are about this freedom of self-determination. In a certain way, each  painting quits the others, hoping to be the first to announce its independence. Together they form an allegiance of quitters, each with a mind of its own.  


—Aschely Cone, March 2022

Works
  • Bridget Mullen, Interior Design, 2022
    Bridget Mullen, Interior Design, 2022
  • BRIDGET MULLEN, CONSENSUAL PAINTING, 2020
    BRIDGET MULLEN, CONSENSUAL PAINTING, 2020
  • BRIDGET MULLEN, QUITTERS (2), 2019-2022
    BRIDGET MULLEN, QUITTERS (2), 2019-2022
  • Bridget Mullen, Beauty Homunculus, 2021
    Bridget Mullen, Beauty Homunculus, 2021
  • BRIDGET MULLEN, A SPUR, AN ARRAY, AS REEF, THE CHORD, 2022
    BRIDGET MULLEN, A SPUR, AN ARRAY, AS REEF, THE CHORD, 2022
  • Bridget Mullen, Free To Be You And Me, 2021
    Bridget Mullen, Free To Be You And Me, 2021
  • BRIDGET MULLEN, EASELS BROWSERS, 2022
    BRIDGET MULLEN, EASELS BROWSERS, 2022
  • BRIDGET MULLEN, STILL SNAKES, 2022
    BRIDGET MULLEN, STILL SNAKES, 2022
  • Bridget Mullen, Pit, 2022
    Bridget Mullen, Pit, 2022
  • BRIDGET MULLEN, HEART AS METAPHOR FOR GRAVITY AS METAPHOR FOR HEART-SHAPED EARRING, 2019-2021
    BRIDGET MULLEN, HEART AS METAPHOR FOR GRAVITY AS METAPHOR FOR HEART-SHAPED EARRING, 2019-2021
  • Bridget Mullen, Sluggers, 2022
    Bridget Mullen, Sluggers, 2022
  • BRIDGET MULLEN, FUTURE FARMERS, 2022
    BRIDGET MULLEN, FUTURE FARMERS, 2022
  • BRIDGET MULLEN, QUITTERS, 2020-2022
    BRIDGET MULLEN, QUITTERS, 2020-2022
  • Bridget Mullen, Double Blind, 2022
    Bridget Mullen, Double Blind, 2022
Installation Views
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: Quitters Install 2
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: Quitters Install 7
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: Karg Mullen 4477
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: Quitters Install 3
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: Quitters Install 4
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: Quitters Install 1
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: Karg Mullen 4481
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: Karg Mullen 4480
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: Quitters Install 5
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: Quitters Install 6
Publications
  • Quitters

    Quitters

    BRIDGET MULLEN 2022
    Paperback 30 pages
    Publisher: Nathalie Karg Gallery
    Dimensions: 8 x 5 1/2 in
    Read more
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Nathalie Karg Gallery 

 

127 Elizabeth Street, New York, NY 10013

Info@nathaliekarg.com

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