Marc Selwyn Fine Art is pleased to present a groundbreaking exhibition of paintings and computer-generated works by Lee Mullican (1919-1998). In the gallery’s seventh show by the artist, projections of Mullican’s digital works will be displayed in their native digital format for the first time alongside a selection of the artist’s paintings from 1966-1985. By pairing Mullican’s digital works with his canvases, Computer Joy explores the links among Mullican’s innovations in midcentury painting, his computer based inventions of the 1980s, and developments in 21st century digital technology.
In the mid-1980s at the age of 67, Lee Mullican, best known for his linear paletteknife technique, began working with UCLA’s Program for Technology in the Arts toexplore how this signature painting style might translate to the emerging digitalimaging technology of the day. The possibilities new technology afforded, paired withMullican’s advanced painting practice, resulted in spectacularly buzzing dense digitalcompositions of complex color palettes and illusions of depth.
Mullican found inspiration in the similarities between his painting styleand acomputerized matrix, particularly the dark background paintings he began to producein the late 1970s: “I examined why I thought the computer was for me. Even in mypaintings, I was always working with pattern and line and color. I’ve had a built-incomputer ever since I’ve been doing art.” Replacing his brush and signature paletteknife striations with a clickable mouse and pen-like stylus, Mullican was able tomerge the late Surrealist method of automatism with the computer’s instant andprecise replication of marks.He stated “I found that beyond what one thought, thecomputer as being hard-lined, analytical, and predictable, it was indeed a mediumfueled with the automatic, enabled by chance, and accident to discover new ways ofmaking imagery."