Artist of the day: Artist of the Day, May 22, 2021: Daniel Mullen, a Scottish-born painter (#1290)

Saturday, May 22, 2021

Artist of the Day, May 22, 2021: Daniel Mullen, a Scottish-born painter (#1290)

Daniel Mullen (1985) is a Scottish artist who lives and works in Amsterdam, Holland. Daniel exclusively creates abstract paintings. He describes the backbone of his artistic influence as a mixture of Dutch architecture and formalistic, abstract painting. The architect Gerrit Rietveld, a leader of the De Stijl movement, held a critical role in the development of Daniel's aesthetic and imagery.

Daniel has always sought to establish a sense of transparent weightlessness to his paintings, "the scale (of which) is left to the imagination of the viewer." While Daniel's paintings possess a certain surface reality, the entirety of their structure is impossible to fully realize. Daniel's artworks challenge our very idea of perception.

Daniel Mullen’s paintings concern both real and imagined architectural spaces which he explores through a visual language inspired these constructions. In his work, he seeks to represent that which is not there, the unseen. Using a raw linen canvas as a starting point, he creates layered images, playing with depth and light to explore both Western philosophical approaches to nothingness and Eastern thoughts on emptiness. He sees the plain canvas as the emptiness and the painted whole surface as the nothingness, filling the potential space between them with abstract architectural volumes and shapes. The angles of a shape or a plane are switched around, some seem to project outwards, others retreat. His palette is often influenced by memories or feelings and he cites Mondrian as a source of inspiration who has guided him through the process of abstracting physical architecture.

After completing his degree in Fine Arts at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, in 2012 Daniel went on to be nominated for the Buning Brongers Prize for painting and was also a finalist in the TV program The Nieuwe Rembrandt. Daniel has exhibited at Art Basel Miami, Amsterdam, New York City, London, Berlin and most recently in Turin, Italy. In 2014 he was nominated for the Dutch Royal Prize for painting (koninklijke prijs for schilderkunst) and in 2016 he was long-listed for the Aesthetica Art Price. In 2017 Mullen won the public prize for the Summer show Nieuw Dakota and Francis Boeske projects in Amsterdam. His works reside in a number of corporate and private collections including Akzo Noble (Netherlands), Hughes Hubbard and Reed LLP (Miami), Edison Investment Research (London), Bloodbank (Amsterdam) and Pace Architects (Kuwait).

© 2021. All content on this blog is protected by international copyright laws All images are copyrighted © by Daniel Mullen. Apart from fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review as permitted under the Copyright Act, the use of any image from this site is prohibited unless prior written permission is obtained. All images used for illustrative purposes only