Marlon Mullen

Born in 1963, Marlon Mullen is a painter who lives and works in Contra Costa County, California, where he has maintained a studio practice at NIAD Art Center since 1993. Mullen has autism spectrum disorder, and is mostly non-verbal. Although it is unclear how much he can read, he represents his own understanding of words and uses their forms in his work. He mostly works from magazine covers and paints them abstractly on paper and canvas.

His work has been shown in galleries such as The Nevica Project (Chicago), JTT (New York), White Columns (New York), Sorry, We’re Closed (Brussels), and Adams And Ollman (Portland). He was one of the standout artists in the 2019 Whitney Biennial in New York and is included in the 2019 SFMOMA’s SECA Awards exhibition.

In Mullen's short professional career, he has already been collected by many important art patrons and included in several museum collections such as Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Berkeley Art Museum, California; Portland Art Museum, Oregon; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; MADMusée, Belgium.