Nikko Mueller with HereIn
Substance is Incidental, 2022, acrylic on folded canvas, 80 x 66 in.
[Image description: A large raw canvas with a horizontal band of gathered, pleated canvas covering the top third of the composition. The pleated canvas is painted with a pattern of alternating triangles in a color palette of greens, grays, and blue with pops of purple and orange. On the right side, a single thin brown triangle extends the vertical length of the canvas.]
Nikko Mueller takes a systematic approach to abstract painting, disrupting his own precise geometric compositions in an oblique gesture of deconstruction aimed at our inherited ideologies. Working within his own strict parameters, Mueller challenges art-historical theory, from the colonial project of 19th-century American landscape paintings to the hermeticism and hypermasculinity of Formalism, working to reintegrate both socio-political reality and the artist’s labor into each of his works. He spoke with HereIn Conversations Contributor, Jordan Karney Chaim about making and breaking rules, and finding the balance between critique and repair.
HereIn: I see some new forms in the studio. Can you tell me about what are you working on right now?
Nikko Mueller: I’m playing with two different things simultaneously. One project is more symbol- or imaged- based, drawing on referents outside the painting itself. These are paintings in the shape of classical or neoclassical columns, unstretched and ultimately folded. And then there are the more strictly geometric abstraction pieces. There is a lot of crossover of the language between them but I haven’t decided how or if they directly intersect.
Fallen Capitol, 2022, acrylic on folded canvas, 24 x 80 in.
[Image description: An unstretched canvas cut and painted to resemble a neoclassical column lays on its side, with its broken pediment positioned slightly to the right. The column is painted in stripes of blues, mauves, and beiges in varying tones, and then folded to convey a sense of damage or destruction.]
I started the columns early last spring. I was thinking a lot about images from the January 6th insurrection. It was an unbelievable thing to watch, to see this anarchy in the capitol, and see these institutions that have this orderly and contrived appearance being overrun. I thought about Roman ruins, and how these images of the classical world have been used throughout history to further a carefully constructed notion of American national identity. So much of the colonial period was about imagining the United States as inheritors of the Roman republic’s grandeur and power.
I have been thinking about these ideological constructions for a long time. My grandfather was an art historian, and one of his areas of research was the [1893] World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago. In his description and that of others, this was a seminal moment in American history—America stepping on the world’s stage as a power, coming into its own, but also cementing so much of the racism, inequity, and exploitation that have also shaped this country. And a lot of this was expressed through this absolutely over the top, pristinely white-plaster-painted, neoclassical fantasy of a new Rome, a new empire. That image has always been lodged in my head.
Cracked Column, 2022, acrylic on folded canvas, 60 x 20 in.
[Image description: A vertically-oriented unstretched canvas cut and painted to resemble a neoclassical column. The column is painted in stripes of white, grays, pinks, and blues in varying tones with a pop of green in the center, and then folded to convey a sense of damage.]
With all that in mind I started making these columns I could fold up. Folding them was a way to make them “ruins,” a representation of collapsing or crumbling. But since these are ultimately images rather than actual columns, the folding up also became an act of altering rather than destroying. There were traces left behind that could be reconstructed or reformed, which aligns with the processes of repair and transformation that I am also after. I thought about what it could mean to fold them and disrupt the lines, and then reconnect them. Could it translate to thinking of new ways of putting together our fragmented population?
HereIn: You mean like bringing together different factions with similar values or goals that may not have found each other without this kind of reworking?
Mueller: Yes, exactly. I think there’s something in trying to restore but also transform some of those motifs. At least that’s where I hope we are—able to see the opportunity presented by the schism that we’re in.
The Circular Ruin (Manila City Jail), 2009, acrylic on canvas over panel, 40 x 30 in.
[Image description: An aerial view of a complex of buildings reduced to squares and rectangles of varying sizes rendered is a range of purples, rusty pinks, and blue-grays. A circular structure sits at the center of the composition surrounded by long rectangles radiating outward. Tighter grids occupy the top right and bottom register of the painting.]
HereIn: You mentioned your grandfather earlier, and I learned that he was also an historian of the Hudson River School, and that challenging the conventions of 19th-century landscape painting has been central to your work. For me, knowing this sharpens the conceptual consistency over the course of your career, linking bodies of work that feel very visually distinct.
Mueller: I think that the big stylistic changes can feel like they break with my theories, but for me it’s all connected through my perception of the world. The aerial images [begun over a decade ago] and my current work are ultimately all about patterns—patterns that have a kind of rationality to them, that presume a certain kind of authority. We try to orchestrate the environment around us in a way that is logical and orderly, and in a country like America that was shaped by so much ideology, there is a lot embedded in these patterns.
Port of LA, 2018, acrylic on canvas over panel, 63 x 80 in.
[Image description: An aerial view of gray, concrete-like formation set against a dark blue background. A network of sweeping lines, clusters of circles and carefully organized groups of rectangles cover the surface, resembling roads, buildings, and shipping containers.]
The entire West, everything from Appalachia, on pretty much, is essentially covered in a planned grid. That’s what really interested me initially with the mapping and aerial images. But I kept being drawn to the parts that didn’t conform to these ideologies; where there was some sort of schism, or an intersection of different things. Everything from how old and new city grids meet, to borders and definitions between public and private space. The things that feel really baked into the landscape are part of how we control access to, or define, a certain image of what American life is. Imposing that structure over a landscape and its inhabitants—and how we have continued to do that over time—is kind of wild to me.
Mutually Inconsistent, 2022, acrylic on folded canvas, 48 x 48 in.
[Image description: A roughly pleated rectangle extends across the middle of an otherwise unpainted canvas. The rectangle is painted with precise diagonal bands of color that are predominantly in shades of red, brown, and orange, with accents of blue, green, and fuchsia.]
HereIn: Since problem solving and negotiating control are so central to your work, I’m curious to know more about the rules you make for yourself in your paintings. Do they change project to project? Or do you find yourself coming up with new parameters for each work?
Mueller: The thing that attracted me to painting was that it’s this unbounded space where anything can happen, which was exciting and terrifying. Rules have always felt very important to me, but I was also a really punk rock teenager and I hate rules, too. It’s a complicated relationship.
Each body of work has its own rules, and then I try to be critical of those rules. It’s been a longstanding rule in my work that each shape gets a definitive color. There’s a specificity to any form that goes on the canvas, those parameters are really defined. And then sometimes I use rules to generate compositions. When I started Substance is Incidental, I was thinking about having a basic pattern of triangles that were pushing against each other. There was dark and light, but I wanted there to be a story in the color relationships, so I made it in very sequential way and each triangle responded to the previous one in terms of color theory.
Self-Critical to Self-congratulatory, 2022, acrylic on folded canvas, 26 x 14 in.
[Image description: A vertical band of roughly pleated canvas painted with an interlocking triangle pattern is slightly off center on an otherwise raw canvas. The triangles on the right side of the central form range from light pink and purple to blue and orange. On the left side, the triangles are dark browns, blues, and greens.]
Another rule: Every painting in my folded series needs to start off occupying the entire stretcher, edge to edge. So, in Substance is Incidental these triangles went from the top of the canvas to the bottom with maybe a one-inch border around the edge.
Before I fold them, I always make a painting that I am fairly comfortable with, that feels resolved or could exist on its own. And then I have to disrupt it. I love making paintings that have these clear shapes and strong forms and color, but they never quite feel like they are doing enough. There’s also this idea of the mathematics of it: the parts you can see and the parts you can’t add up to the whole thing. There is something that feels important to me about that.
HereIn: That makes me think again of the status of the socio-political content in your work: it’s the combination of the visible material elements and the conceptual content that together add up to the whole piece. Maybe that perfectly executed initial painting is not enough because it doesn’t acknowledge the broader context of the work’s creation.
Mueller: Yes—all the stuff behind and around it. The invisible labor of the painting too, having the margins come in. The labor of stretching the canvas not only happens twice, but that activity becomes more palpable in the final painting.
Between Parentheses, 2022, friends’ clothing and polyfil, dimensions variable
[Image description: An image of a gallery space with white walls and a red terracotta tile floor. On the back wall hangs a painting depicting four dark ovals. In the foreground on the floor is a soft snakey sculpture made of clothing, sewn together and stuffed. Blue, gray, and black jeans are visible, along with a plaid workshirt, and variously colored t-shirts.]
HereIn: In your most recent show at Best Practice, there was a massive soft floor sculpture, Between Parentheses, which provided an intriguing contrast to the hanging paintings. Was that the first soft sculpture you’ve made?
Mueller: It was. There are so many textile allusions in these recent paintings; I really liked the idea of a piece actually being made out of fabric. I’m interested in the ways that forms that seem inhuman can then become human, and for a while I’d been thinking about what it would look like if you were to attach the openings of one piece of clothing to all of the openings in others.
I was also thinking a lot about the effects of the pandemic and the weirdness of the times we’ve lived through. I went pretty underground. I have little kids and was just hiding out at home. I was kind of off social media because that felt very bleak to me at the time, too, and so I hadn’t been in touch with a lot of people that I care about. When I thought of the idea for this piece, I was so excited because it gave me an excuse to get in touch with a bunch of friends. So I started emailing and asking for clothes. It was a fairly easy ask and gave me an excuse to swing by, grab the clothes and catch up. Even though we were social distancing, we could still have some connection.
HereIn: You made yourself a kind of tangible analog social network.
Mueller: Exactly. It was really fun actually as we were sewing everything together—my wife Hallie helped a ton with the stitching—because we both knew all these people, we were like, “Oh I’m connecting Josh with Joe right now.” It was funny and also really intimate, being all up in their clothing. After it was sewn, I really wanted to stuff it so that it could become a chill out space where you could plop down and sort of hang out with the paintings.
I was having this proxy cuddle with all my friends, but many people who saw it, including my own kids read the piece as bodies, like a tangle of potentially dead bodies lying on the ground. There were really these mixed experiences, many relating to the various degrees of trauma we have experienced through covid.
What I loved about it—seeing kids diving into it over and over, and then later more adults plopping down—it really did provide a sense of reconnection for me, with my friends, and then also for everybody who had a place to sit or lay and be. It offered this little glimmer of a way to remember the importance of our physical connections to others. It had the hopefulness of that particular pandemic moment, but also the real compromises embedded in it.
This conversation has been edited by HereIn and the artist for length and clarity.