Dino Matt and Marlon Mullen
January 12–February 24, 2018

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 programming for 2018.

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.

Despite working far from its centers, Mullen and his paintings are in direct dialogue with the contemporary art world. In an untitled work from 2016, Mullen reproduces parts of Julien Ceccaldi’s I Am My Goals as seen on the cover of the 2014 summer issue of Artforum. Mullen’s interpretation prioritizes the graphic qualities of the cartoon and distills the original text to simply “I See.” In another work from 2017, Mullen creates a complex surface with a pink fleshy central form, the artist's rendering of a hand raised in protest, inspired by Wolfgang Tillman’s Black Lives Matter Protest, Union Square as seen on another Artforum cover. On view will be new works that have a range of sources from Horizon Magazine to Vincent Sheean's 1951 memoir of Edna St. Vincent Millay, the American poet and playwright.

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. The artist begins by making quick movements or marks with bits of clay that he then pieces together until they reveal their composition, often compact and volumetric. Matt then revisits the individual impressions, glazing each in a range of hues reminiscent of the southwest desert.

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.

Marlon Mullen’s (b.1963, Richmond, CA) work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Atlanta Contemporary, Georgia, White Columns and JTT, both New York. He has been included in “Under Another Name” at The Studio Museum, Harlem and “Create,” co-curated by Larry Rinder and Matthew Higgs, at the Berkeley Art Museum, California, as well as in group exhibitions at Maccarone, New York, International Art Objects, Los Angeles and Jack Fischer Gallery, San Francisco. He has been working at the National Institute of Art & Disabilities Art Center (NIAD) in Richmond, California since 1986 and received the Wynn Newhouse Award in 2015. His work is in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Dino Matt (b.1987) lives and works in Portland, Oregon.

installation view: Dino Matt and Marlon Mullen


installation view: Dino Matt and Marlon Mullen


installation view: Dino Matt and Marlon Mullen



installation view: Dino Matt and Marlon Mullen



installation view: Dino Matt and Marlon Mullen



installation view: Dino Matt and Marlon Mullen



installation view: Dino Matt and Marlon Mullen



installation view: Dino Matt and Marlon Mullen



installation view: Dino Matt and Marlon Mullen



installation view: Dino Matt and Marlon Mullen


installation view: Dino Matt and Marlon Mullen


installation view: Dino Matt and Marlon Mullen


installation view: Dino Matt and Marlon Mullen


installation view: Dino Matt and Marlon Mullen


installation view: Dino Matt and Marlon Mullen


Marlon Mullen
Untitled, 2016
acrylic on canvas
36 x 36 inches
Mm-2016-116-P1459


Marlon Mullen
Untitled, 2017
acrylic on canvas
24 x 24 inches
Mm-2017-119-P5131


Marlon Mullen
Untitled, 2017
acrylic on canvas
36 x 36 inches
Mm-2017-132-P1705


Marlon Mullen
Untitled, 2016
acrylic on canvas
36 x 36 inches
Mm-2016-127-P0928


Marlon Mullen
Untitled, 2016
acrylic on canvas
36 x 36 inches
Mm-2016-136-P0675


Marlon Mullen
Untitled, 2017
acrylic on canvas
34 x 32 inches
Mm-2017-150-P800


Marlon Mullen
Untitled, 2017
acrylic on canvas
30 x 30 inches
Mm-2017-151-P0801


Marlon Mullen
Untitled, 2017
acrylic on canvas
36 x 26 inches
Mm-2017-152-P0808


Dino Matt
Untitled, 2017
glazed stoneware
10 3/4 x 5 1/2 inches
DMatt 33


Dino Matt
Untitled, 2017
glazed stoneware
6 1/2 x 4 1/2 inches
DMatt 34


Dino Matt
Untitled, 2017
glazed stoneware
12 x 4 3/4 inches
DMatt 35


Dino Matt
Untitled, 2017
glazed stoneware
10 1/2 x 5 3/4 inches
DMatt 38


Dino Matt
Untitled, 2017
glazed stoneware
11 x 5 inches
DMatt 41


Dino Matt
Untitled, 2018
glazed stoneware
13 1/2 x 8 inches
DMatt 201842


Dino Matt
Untitled, 2018
glazed stoneware
14 x 4 inches
DMatt 201844


Dino Matt
Untitled, 2018
glazed stoneware
7 x 4 1/2 inches
DMatt 201846


Dino Matt
Untitled, 2017
glazed stoneware
11 x 5 inches
DMatt 31


Dino Matt
Untitled, 2018
glazed stoneware
11 x 5 inches
DMatt 201853


Dino Matt
Untitled, 2018
glazed stoneware
8 1/4 x 3 inches
DMatt 201855


Dino Matt
Untitled, 2018
glazed stoneware
6 x 3 1/2 inches
DMatt 201851