front gallery | Star Wars and book

Paul Mulllins Look, You Don’t Have to Tell Me

november 24, 2024 - january 5, 2025

curated by william cordova

under the bridge art space is pleased to present. Look, You Don’t Have to Tell Me”, a solo exhibition by artist, Paul Mullins. Mullins, an artist alumni at South Florida Art Center (Oolite Arts) 1997-1999, returns to Miami with a series of painting, meditating on memory, recognition, lived histories, and material culture but also magic and transcendence. Paul Mullins’ intimate paintings focus on a personal but also plural memory landscape. One that foregoes a structuralist approach and liberates through the affirmation of our collective recognition. “to affirm is not to bear, carry or harness oneself to that which exists,  but on the contrary to unburden, unharness and set free that which lives,” stated philosopher Guilles Deleuze. He was correct.

Paul Mullins’ paintings draw from an eclectic palette that includes references to 1970s Star Wars toy backing boards, LP covers by Blondie, Oasis, Kiss, Prince and Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five. His densely painted works harness what may seem as fleeting moments, static but blurred echoes of nostalgia. But these works are not about nostalgia they are about “the notion that handmade things, pictures in particular, can contain something distinct ( even alchemical.”

“Stillness is not so much the temporal absence of movement  but as the charged potential for it.”  - Deborah Jowitt

 -william cordova, curator

side gallery | paintings record covers

Paul Mullins | Biography

 Born in 1970 in Charleston, WV. Paul Mullins lives  and works in Pittsburgh, PA. as an Educator: MFA from Ohio University (1994). His drawings and paintings offer high quantities of memory , class and place with an underpinning of years spent probing the questionable construct of masculinity. The works can be at once enthusiastic and apprehensive about the imagery with which they are replete: iconography plundered from the cheapest of cultural sources and associated with ways of life that contemporary coastal Americans should supposedly regard as less successful, if not outright, undesirable. For much of his career, Mullins has contemplated the changing(or unchanging) social positions in the U.S. His own lived history as an Appalachian native combines with a curiosity and affection for art-making as an undertaking (described more more as a business) that is (and always has been) concentrated in a few areas that are characterized by great wealth.

back gallery | drawings