Malcolm Mooney @ Tilton Gallery, NYC - "Artifacts, Rituals, and Trespasses" Exhibition

Malcolm Mooney:

Artifacts, Rituals, and Trespasses

Tilton Gallery, New York

September 4 - November 2, 2024

MALCOLM MOONEY

Black Float from Above, 1986

Oil on canvas

36 x 47 1/2 inches / 9104 x 120.7 cm

© Malcolm Mooney / Courtesy Tilton Gallery

Tilton Gallery presents a solo exhibition of works by visual artist, vocalist, poet, and lyricist MALCOLM MOONEY. This is the artist’s first exhibition with Tilton.

Malcolm Mooney was born in Yonkers in 1944. He received his BFA from the Boston University School of Fine and Applied Arts in 1978 and his MFA from California State University in 1987. Malcolm Mooney’s storied career has spanned the disciplines of visual art and music for over 50 years. He has performed and exhibited extensively throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe. Exhibition venues include the Aspen Art Museum and White Columns, New York. Most recently, he exhibited in Düsseldorf, Germany in 2023. He has lived in Germany, New York, and Los Angeles and currently lives and works in Calgary, Canada where he teaches at the Alberta University of the Arts.

The exhibition includes seminal early abstract paintings and works on paper from the 1970s to 1980s as well as examples of works from as recent as 2020. Renowned for his avant-garde music and performances, Mooney’s concurrent dedication to making paintings and drawings is less well known. Tilton brings to light a strong group of works that span this long career and highlight the artist’s ongoing exploration of light, color and structure.

The works on view cover different periods in his art, from bold expressionistic gestures to more formal geometric experiments. Throughout, rhythm and syncopation play an important role, anchoring each work and echoing Malcolm Mooney’s emphasis on improvisation and the rhythmic flow so central to his music and poetry. Vibrant color defines Mooney’s palette, calling to mind Kandinsky’s theories about the relationship of color to sound. He has a history of strong ties with other artists, such as Frederick J. Brown, Gregory Edwards, Ulrich Rückriem, and Ed Clark, for whom he was a studio assistant from 2007 to 2010.

Malcolm Mooney was the original vocalist of the German experimental rock band CAN, whose 1969 debut album, Monster Movie, became one of the most influential recordings in contemporary music. He has performed with many of the great contemporary musicians and he is presently the lead singer in his band, Eleventh Planet.

Previous post about Malcolm Mooney on Wanafoto:

Malcolm Mooney: WORKS: 1970–1986, Ulrick, New York, 2022

TILTON GALLERY

8 East 76 Street, New York, NY 10021

www.jacktiltongallery.com

Malcolm Mooney Exhibition @ Ulrick, NYC - WORKS: 1970–1986

Malcolm Mooney 

WORKS: 1970–1986 

Ulrick, New York

May 26 – July 2, 2022 

WORKS: 1970–1986 is MALCOLM MOONEY’s first solo exhibition in New York in eleven years.

Malcolm Mooney produced his first geometric works in 1970 as set designs for a theater play titled “Harlem Angel,” which was never actually staged. The motif, however, would prove highly productive for Malcolm Mooney. Shortly after he began work on a series of eponymous silk screens at his father’s print shop in Yonkers, New York. He describes the origin of these pieces as developed from an image of kente cloth viewed under a microscope.

This image continued to inform his paintings and drawings of grids throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Malcolm Mooney’s interest evolved further through his encounter with the 1972 exhibition “African Textiles and Decorative Arts” at the Museum of Modern Art, his friendship with textile curator and shopkeeper Sara Penn as well as his own work in the mechanical processes of textile design.

From experiments with utilitarian objects to stage and lighting design, from graphic design to work with textiles, clothing, and even runway shows, there persists an ongoing migration between the applied and “high art” in Malcolm Mooney’s work which intentionally cross-pollinates both.

The metaphoric potential of darkness and shadow is another theme which appears throughout Malcolm Mooney’s work, as is the case in The Abyss, Space in the Night, from 1974. Originally one of Mooney’s early grid works, it has been almost entirely painted over, cloaking the image in a diaphanous black cloud.

In the same years that minimalists and conceptualists were developing an approach to the grid as an airless, puritanical matrix, Malcolm Mooney's grids were building from an investment in color and tactility, as well as design and craft tradition.

MALCOLM MOONEY (b. 1944 in Yonkers) is an artist, poet, singer and lyricist. He is currently based in Calgary, Canada. He received an MFA from California State University, and a BFA from Boston University’s School of Fine Arts and Applied Arts. Malcolm Mooney has exhibited his work over the past five decades. Solo and group exhibitions of his work include Winterfest, Aspen Art Museum, Aspen (2021), curated by Saim Demircan, as well as White Room, White Columns, New York (2011), organized by Matthew Higgs. Malcolm Mooney is currently an instructor of painting at Alberta University of the Arts.

ULRIK

453 W 17 St, New York, NY 10011

www.ulrik.nyc