Lee Mullican

James Cohan is pleased to present Lee Mullican: The Nest Revived, on view from January 12 through February 25, 2023, at the gallery’s 52 Walker Street location. This is the artist’s fourth solo exhibition at James Cohan. The gallery will host an opening reception on Thursday, January 12 from 5-7 PM. 

Lee Mullican: The Nest Revived spans six decades of formal experimentation by the late West Coast artist. This exhibition brings together important early paintings and rarely-seen wooden assemblages from the 1940s and 50s along with a monumental painting, totemic ceramics, and a groundbreaking digital artwork from the 1980s.

Mullican was a seeker. Drawing on a wide range of influences, he moved between painting and sculpture to push abstraction and pattern beyond the surface of the canvas. The exhibition reflects upon the dynamic processes that defined Mullican’s art-making and reveals the artist’s enduring belief in the spiritual dimension of abstraction. This sensibility was rooted in a lifetime’s study and appreciation of non-Western, global artistic traditions. The 1948 painting from which the exhibition takes its title, The Nest Revived, suggests that for Mullican, the natural world was a place of endless and regenerative inspiration, a point of both origin and return.

To explore the exhibition in our Online Viewing Room, please click here.