LOS ANGELES, CA.- Marc Selwyn Fine Art is presenting Lee Mullican: Silent Shades, an exhibition centered on the paintings created during the artist's Guggenheim year in Rome, together with a selection of terracotta sculptures produced shortly thereafter. The exhibition examines a key moment in the artist’s career when his interests in automatism and ancient cultures coalesced into a powerful new visual language.
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Cosmic Theatre: The Art of Lee Mullican
A volume on Lee Mullican’s visionary art and cosmic imagination
Explore Lee Mullican’s art through abstraction, mysticism, pattern, movement, cosmic vision, and the experimental spirit of postwar American painting.
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Lee Mullican, along with Wolfgang Paalen and Gordon Onslow Ford, was a founding member of the Dynaton, a group that sought to bridge European Surrealism and emerging forms of American abstraction. Named after the Greek word for “the possible,” the Dynaton explored consciousness, mysticism, and the visual expression of forces beyond ordinary perception. While Mullican remained committed to these ideas throughout his life, the year he spent working in Rome marked a significant turning point in his practice.
Working from a studio in a sixteenth-century palazzo, Mullican absorbed the rhythms of the city and the weight of its history. The paintings featured in this exhibition are characterized by richly contrasted black, white, and ivory surfaces animated by dense networks of marks that suggest constellations, topographies, and ancient scripts. Mullican described these works as responses to the sounds and sensations of Rome—traffic, car horns, speeding Vespas, and birds at twilight. Their staccato rhythms transform these impressions into expansive fields of energy, balancing meditation and motion, structure and spontaneity. “These are ‘The Silent Shades’, with arms that enclose the strangest of creatures; breath that expands into landscape; a metamorphosis that can transform the human comedy, comic-physical into the spiritual.” Rather than depicting the visible world, Mullican sought to reveal the forces that animate it, constructing compositions that evoke the Dynaton’s notion of awareness: the meditative self-surrounded by the energy of the landscape.
Following his return from Rome, Mullican expanded his practice beyond painting, producing a series of terracotta sculptures in upstate New York. While markedly different in medium and form, these works share many of the concerns that activated the Rome paintings. Throughout his life, Mullican maintained an admiration for the indigenous and pre-Columbian art of the Americas, actively collecting and studying objects whose symbolic and spiritual dimensions resonated with his own artistic pursuits. The terracottas reflect these influences through their simplified, totemic forms and tactile surfaces, recalling ritual objects, architectural fragments, and archaeological artifacts. Together, the paintings and sculptures reveal an artist searching for visual languages capable of connecting contemporary experience with ancient systems of knowledge and belief. Describing the dual impulses that informed his work, Mullican later remarked, "I was one minute grasping outer space, and the next minute, I was grasping what's below the desert floor." The statement encapsulates the tension at the heart of his practice: a simultaneous fascination with the cosmic and the terrestrial, the future and the ancient past.
Born in Chickasha, Oklahoma in 1919, Mullican studied at the Kansas City Art Institute before serving as a topographical draftsman in the U.S. Army during World War II. Following the war, he settled in San Francisco, where he became a founding member of the Dynaton. After receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1959, he spent a year in Rome before returning to Los Angeles, where he joined the faculty of the UCLA Art Department in 1961 and taught for nearly three decades. A major retrospective spanning fifty years of his work was organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2005.
Mullican’s work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and numerous other institutions.
This show coincides with a comprehensive exploration of the Dynaton movement at Chateau Shatto which runs from June 5 to August 1, 2026.
