Larry Mullins

Larry Mullins

Working under the influence of his southern upbringing, a passion for letterform and the bold, poignant lyrics of John Lennon, Lou Reed and Neil Young, Larry Mullins’ work is painted with all the care and devotion a Baptist preacher might lavish on a Sunday sermon.

Mullins’ art practice is deeply informed by his own history and narratives—narratives he refers to as “verses” which are often composed with a guitar and harmonica. Mullins has resided in a wide variety of locales over the years including, Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he was awarded a Resident Fellowship at The Fine Arts Work Center in 1997 and then Denmark after receiving a Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant in 1998. From there he moved to Brooklyn and then Santa Fe, New Mexico. Each city has inspired and informed his work. Based in Los Angeles since 2007, he describes the “pull” he feels. “LA is a language town. It has more to do with story building and narratives…from visual arts to Hollywood to rhetoric about the scorned and the adorned. Words are a type of fuel. The backdrop to all this is a continuous sunny day.” With their countless layers and paint drips, the paintings conjure the spontaneity and high spirit of the Los Angeles, however, Mullins interweaves that raw immediacy with a thoughtful, calculated harmony.

Of Mullins’ paintings, curator, Christopher French, writes, “What makes this work singular is the boldness with which it fuses image and text into an emblematic abstraction. Like the intertwined words and images of medieval manuscripts, Mullins’ painted pages are made radiant by the terms of their belief.”

Larry Mullins was born in Charlottesville, Virginia. He received his MFA from the University of Maryland in 1996 where he studied under Anne Truitt. Mullins’ work was represented by Bellwether Gallery in New York from 2000-2008. He was awarded the Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation fellowship in 1999, a Pollock Krasner Grant in 1997 and a fellowship at The Fine Arts Work Center in 1996.