LOS ANGELES.- Los Angeles-based artist Mungo Thomson’s works ponder notions of mysticism and the big questions in life with an underlying deadpan wit. For the Hammer’s Lobby Wall, Thomson presents a variation of his “Negative Space” project, which as he puts it, “came out of reflecting on the color of nothing; in outer space the void is black, and in the art context the void – the empty gallery – is always white.” Thomson found an online image archive of starscape photos taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and he’s been downloading the copyright-free images and inverting them with a simple Photoshop tool. The result is a spectacular starburst that looks more like a close-up of minerals or marble than space debris. For the Lobby Wall, Thomson has chosen the M74 and NGC 3370 galaxies.

Mungo Thomson was born in 1969 in Woodland, California, and lives in Los Angeles and Berlin. He attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in 1994, and received an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2000. His work has been featured in solo exhibitions at Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles; John Connelly Presents, New York; the Kadist Art Foundation, Paris; GAMeC, Bergamo, Italy; and the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia (forthcoming). Recent group exhibitions include those at the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, Canada; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Thomson’s work has also been shown in several biennial exhibitions, including the 2008 Whitney Biennial in New York, the 2008 Le Havre Biennale in Le Havre, France; and the 2004 California Biennial at the Orange Country Museum of Art, Newport Beach. Writings on his work have appeared in publications such as Artforum, Frieze, Flash Art, and UOVO.