About the Exhibition

Mark Mulhern: The Pleasure of Seeing features over 30 works—paintings and monotypes—spanning more than 40 years of the career of Milwaukee-based artist, Mark Mulhern. Widely recognized for his vibrant palette and unconventional compositions, this exhibition highlights Mulhern’s ongoing commitment to abstraction, figuration, and color in a wholly personal, inventive way.

Mulhern’s studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison eventually took him to Europe where he spent formative years studying printmaking. Influenced in Paris by late Impressionist painters like Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard, his work is simultaneously narrative and semi-abstract. A self-proclaimed figural painter, Mulhern’s work from the 1980s reflects the Neo-expressionist technique of flattened space crowded with colorful forms and shapes. Later work recontextualizes figures within more ambiguous, atmospheric, or misty backgrounds.

Dividing his professional career between Wisconsin and France, Mulhern finds most of his inspiration abroad. Sketching people chatting in French cafes or browsing in crowded flea markets, he captures moments of connection by, in his own words, portraying figures “caught in subtle gestures that suggest introspection and unselfconscious states of being.” Back home in his Wisconsin studio, Mulhern synthesizes elements from his sketches, working and reworking canvases, where “the push/pull process of working the figure into the right location enriches the surface and creates the emotional tone of the work.” As figures meld into the background, ghostly remnants suggestive of time or memory remain. Many of Mulhern’s most recent compositions involve themes of celebration; in Summer Gathering (2020), gaily clad partygoers mingle in a colorful space filled with party decorations and a tableful of decadent desserts. The guests are softly anonymous, suggestive of types one might find at a party rather than actual individuals.

Much of Mulhern’s work reminds viewers that community and visual delight are essential parts of lived experience. As an artist, his compositions radiate with an unhurried pleasure of seeing while remaining unseen, in simply “being there”—a pleasure that he generously shares.

Images:
(Top) Decadent Party
(Left) Self-Portrait