NYAB Event - Stephen Mueller "New Works"

Stephen Mueller "New Works"

Lennon, Weinberg, Inc.

This event has ended.

Stephen Mueller makes very distinctive abstract paintings, immediately recognizable for their color combinations and symbolic shapes. He establishes a radiant atmospheric field and populates it with ovals, banded circles and other rounded forms, and has introduced into these new paintings spectral rays and fans of colored wedges.

These elements, along with contrasts between opacity and transparency and framing devices that resemble clouds or theatrical curtains, give the paintings an ambiguous spatial reading while at the same time insisting upon their flatness.
Mueller’s paintings reflect his interests in Buddhism, Tantra art, and Tibetan Tanka paintings, but the titles of his recent paintings suggest a far broader interest in cultural mythologies and their contemporary implications. Kalki is an avatar of the Hindu tradition whose appearance will mark the end of the age of darkness, and Mueller uses the name as title for a painting in which opposing black and white clouds part to reveal a cluster of brilliant forms surrounded by hazy auras, drifts of light and revelatory rays. Shu is one of the primordial gods of Egyptian mythology whose role was to separate the sky from the earth and is a fitting title for a painting in which a receding, central blue circle is crowned by a colored fan that snaps the painting taut to the surface. Juno displays an almost planetary arrangement of circles and rays around an arabesque of shapes and contrasting colors that suggests the figure of a floating deity.