🔥 RARE Vintage Modern Minimalist Abstract Painting, Constance MALLINSON 1979

Description: This is an exceptional and important RARE Vintage Modern Minimalist Abstract Painting Drawing, colored pencils on paper, depicting an ethereal and intricately detailed Minimalist tableau. This piece was created by renowned California Modernist painter, Constance Mallinson (b. 1948.) From several feet away, this artwork appears to be a teal square floating in a sea of white. However, when viewed up close, an infinitely detailed and tiny tightly woven pattern emerges, comprised of fine chevron and hounds tooth shapes, delicately incorporated with colored pencils with near machine-like precision. What appeared Minimalistic from afar is in fact a pattern or weaving of enormous detail and intricacy. This was the ethos behind Mallinson's 1970's works, which embraced late Modernist Minimalism, while incorporating themes of weaving and patterns, which are reflected in traditionally feminine handicrafts such as quilts and embroidery. Her feminist approach to the accepted norms and philosophies of late-stage Modernism created a new genre of art in its own right, and she is now recognized as one of the pioneers of this little-known artistic movement. Signed and dated: "C. Mallinson '79" in graphite in the lower right corner. Additionally, an old, yellowed exhibition label from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art reads: "Constance Mallinson. March 7, 1979. Untitled Drawing #37. Colored Pencil..." Approximately 24 3/8 x 30 3/8 inches (including frame.) Actual artwork is approximately 23 x 29 inches. Very good condition for age, with some light soiling to the top left edge of the frame, and some light separation to the bottom left corner of the frame (please see photos.) Acquired from an affluent old collection in Los Angeles County, California. Priced to Sell. Mallinson's original works are in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, and the San Jose Museum of Art, among others. If you like what you see, I encourage you to make an Offer. Please check out my other listings for more wonderful and unique artworks! About the Artist: Constance Mallinson (b.1948, Washington, D.C.) is a Los Angeles based painter, writer and curator. During her career, she has exhibited widely and her critically acclaimed paintings are included in the collections of Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, The San Jose Museum, and the Pomona Art Museum, the National Academy of Sciences. She has taught all levels of studio art and criticism at the major colleges and universities in Southern California and has written for many art publications such as Art in America, Xtra, Artillery, the Times Quotidian, and numerous catalog essays for university art museums. Her most recent curatorial projects have included “Urbanature” at ArtCenter College of Design, "The Feminine Sublime" at the Pasadena Museum of California Art, and “Small is beautiful” at the Irvine Fine Arts Center. Mallinson is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a COLA Fellowship. Twenty-four of her collages, transferred to porcelain enamel steel, are permanently installed at the Bergamot Station Metro Station. Constance Mallinson has exhibited widely throughout California and nationally. Recent solo exhibitions include The Armory in Pasadena, Woodbury University, Pomona College, UC Riverside, The Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, and Angles Gallery in Los Angeles. In 2016 she curated and participated in the acclaimed “Urbanature” exhibition at ArtCenter in Pasadena and Pasadena Museum of California Art’s “The Feminine Sublime”. The MOCA Exhibition “Pattern and Decoration” (2019) included three of her historical works from the movement She was the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship as well as a City of Los Angeles Artist’s grant (COLA). She has had numerous public commissions including the EXPO Line MTA Bergamot Station permanent artwork installation (2016) and the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C. Her work has been noted by art critics such as Christopher Knight and articles on her work have appeared in all the major art publications. Her paintings can be seen in many private and public art collections from LACMA , the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, the Crocker Museum, to the San Jose Museum. Paint into Pattern—Constance Mallinson works 1979-1982 In the early 1970’s Constance Mallinson’s paintings of floating grids of rectangles in pale atmospheric fields were clearly inspired by the formalist and minimalist approaches that dominated late Modernist aesthetics. By the late 70’s, however, the cool reductivism of modular, serial painting had begun to be challenged by artists who wanted to “revitalize the sensuousness of painting” with rich color, personal mark making and sumptuous textures. Such artists who were allied with feminist theory in their aims of more inclusivity in a male dominated art world and less driven by Greenbergian admonitions against narrative and the personal. They called for a “defiant embrace “of forms traditionally coded as “low art”, feminine, domestic, or craft based such as weaving, architectural decorations, quilt making, handicrafts, calligraphy, and decorative ceramic motifs. This attitude quickly materialized into the “Pattern and Decoration Movement”. Concurrently Mallinson sought ways to reinsert gesture and relief-like surface textures into her paintings in which those qualities, reflecting the rhetoric of minimalism, had all but disappeared. Profoundly influenced by both feminist politics and the P&D artists, she turned to the intricate, often dizzying designs of textiles and embroideries from many cultures for inspiration. Many of those products were grid based, so Mallinson retained an underlying grid structure that had characterized her early abstract paintings as well as the large scale—perceived as a sign of ambitious painting. In a synthesis of minimalism and “maximalism”, she began laboriously layering thousands of tiny brushstrokes or pencil marks in interlocking designs to create dense, sensual fields of impressionistic color. Via herringbones, chevrons, Bargello patterns, and Chinese lattices, viewers were immersed in a meditative experience of endlessly replicating lines and forms. Effectively creating a bridge between the Modernist insistence on flatness and medium purity, Mallinson emphatically emphasized painting’s dependence on and fusion with textiles (canvas) but also asserted the primacy of personal expression and the idiosyncratic mark which had been denigrated more recently in Modernist “high art”. The drawings and paintings on view here evidence her commitment to breaking down those barriers to revivify her painting practice and introduce personal content. They were an important link to her eventual return to figuration in the mid 1980’s. The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles has mounted an exhibition, “With Pleasure, Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972-1985” reconsidering this important, little studied movement. Many of the artists in this exhibition, like Mallinson, were underrecognized for their contributions and are being reconsidered in the wider context of late twentieth century artistic achievements. Their openness to global and ethnic influences, gender inclusion, and alternative voices was invaluable to the vitality of contemporary art today. The MOCA exhibition and this small exhibition of drawings and paintings are a testament to her role in that process. Red Line Opening Poster Series: Constance MallinsonArtist(s): Constance MallinsonMetro rail poster series commemorating the opening of the Metro Red Line, now B Line (Red), features the work of Constance Mallinson Constance Mallinson Constance Mallinson uses the traditional genre of landscape painting to suggest a new way of looking at the world. Mallinson’s global village shows an information-driven society, discovering and rediscovering its past while moving towards the future. The painting resembles the Internet in structure and content with multiple perspectives and various entry and exit points. Many of the traditional barriers of time and location no longer exist in an Internet-based society, and the world is coming together in ways never before seen. Similarly, new technology, from the electron microscope to the Hubble telescope, allows people to visualize previously unknown aspects of the universe. One can see microcosm and macrocosm simultaneously and use the knowledge gained from one to complement the other. Constance Mallinson’s painting was commissioned by the National Academies to celebrate the dedication of the Keck Center and includes references to the activities of each of the Academies’ major divisions: the National Academy of Sciences, the National Research Council, the National Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Medicine, and the Transportation Research Board. MEET PLASTIC PROBLEMS PAINTER CONSTANCE MALLINSON (October 16, 2023) With a taste for the sumptuous detail and prismatic colors of 17th-century Dutch still life painting, and an equal love for picturesque landscape and the random plastic garbage she collects on her daily walks, Constance Mallinson blends classic modes of art history with a critique of modern hyper-consumerism. Like Rauschenberg on his one-block-radius hunt for his Columbine series’ sculptural materials, she accumulates and hoards all manner of found objects—toys, food wrappers, containers, ribbons, balloons, figurines, accessories, electronics, grooming tools, giftwrap, bubble wrap, styrofoam, tape, tokens, bags, dolls, straws, novelties, baby stuff, stress balls—before arranging them into compositions, and rendering their kaleidoscopes of clutter in photorealist, 1:1 scale. Evoking surprise, delight, disgust, nostalgia, whimsy, humor, horror, and shame, Mallinson’s prismatic paintings are confoundingly, deliberately beautiful, creating a cognitive dissonance in the viewer between the work’s seductive aesthetic and its spotlighting of our environmentally toxic behavior. As a pink plastic Koonsian rabbit perches on a glacier and it all melts into the sea; as shimmering plastic ribbons slither across verdant forests; as rare tree frogs dissolve into a bit of AbEx frenzy, we are reminded that when we throw things away, there is no such thing as “away.” The L.A. Weekly corresponded with Mallinson on the occasion of her current solo exhibition—a series of intimately scaled paintings in which she pursues her issues-based ideas, obsessive gathering of detritus, and advanced studio technique. Rather than the large, even monumental, scale at which she is known to work, in this series Mallinson offers small-scale works replete with intimate gestures, distilled narratives, and hidden treasures. At this scale as well, Mallinson is thinking about cycles, stories, and hands—her own/the artist’s, the viewer’s, and perhaps most of all the hands that first manufactured then shipped, owned, and finally discarded the treasured trash Mallinson would later collect by hand for use in an entirely new purpose. L.A. WEEKLY: When did you first know you were an artist?CONSTANCE MALLINSON: “Artist” is a culturally constructed identity that has many implications so until one reaches art school or slightly before, one does not attach great meaning to the word. But in looking back, I think I met some of the criteria when: I could keep myself endlessly engaged in an activity and didn’t need outside entertainment; I often chose to play by myself rather than with my friends; I preferred making things to buying them; I asked a lot of questions; I really (often to my chagrin) did not fit in with the crowd. Now I know why! What is your short answer to people who ask what your work is about?OK, I’ll try not to be as long-winded as I usually am. Using the traditional language of paint with its unique qualities of color, compositional and formal freedoms and its rich history the paintings bring into focus the “fatal attraction” of late capitalist hyper consumption. From my daily walks through the urban streets I glean all manner of mostly plastic post consumer objects, many of which are stunningly beautiful and seductive (especially when rendered in paint) but are contributing to the demise of the planet. We all share in this abundance/waste cycle so here it is documented for consideration. What would you be doing if you weren’t an artist?Probably something in the other arts. I contemplated careers in music, acting, and writing. Seems art was easiest for me and I wouldn’t age out when my voice failed. Although my daughters tell me I should have been a therapist. Why do you live and work in LA and not elsewhere?I contemplated NYC quite a bit but moved here from Washington, DC with my spouse in the late 70’s. I found L.A. exciting and especially loved the proximity to so many natural wonders. Now that I have an amazing garden I can’t imagine life without it in a concrete jungle, as it feeds me in so many ways. The vibrancy of the art community is fantastic. When was your current show or project?I currently have an exhibition of “Recent Small Works” at Rory Devine Fine Art in West Adams through October 28. I typically have worked in a monumental scale and for this show reversed course and tried to pack in as much content and visual punch as I could on a small scale. What artist living or dead would you most like to show your work with?I continue to study Dutch still life from the 17th century and find many similarities with that period—the ostentatious display of wealth and sumptuous objects, voracious capitalism—so artists such as Pieter Boel, Jacob Jordaens, and Willem Kalf would make an interesting pairing. But in the present, I will be having a two-person exhibition with my longtime friend and colleague, painter Merion Estes, next year and am very much looking forward to our mutual show with two different approaches to similar content. Do you listen to music while you work?I absolutely have to! I have a very diverse taste in music: Bach keyboard, English 20th Century Modern, Bill Evans, Keith Jarrett, a lot of the new Icelandic composers like Nils Frahm, Max Richter, Arvo Part, Harold Budd, all the way to Johnny Greenwood and Black Country. The list is too huge to enumerate, except that since I studied piano, I listen to a lot of it. Throughout her long career, Constance Mallinson has explored the tensions and interconnections between the natural and human-made world. With roots as diverse as Hieronymus Bosch, Dutch still life, Surrealism and Modernist abstraction, her most recent paintings are intricate compositions depicting quantities of post-consumer commodities intermingled with natural detritus– both collected on her daily walks through Los Angeles. Oscillating between the darkly humorous or silly and the apocalyptic, the paintings are full of contradictions: both repellent and beautiful the decaying leaves and branches have a sensual Baroque quality while the hundreds of objects represented are bright and seductive belying their status as trash. Rendered in a near Old Master technique combined with passages of pure abstract painterly gesture, the large- and small-scale paintings variously suggest human faces, ocean gyres, explosions, and trash dumps. The paintings provoke myriad questions about our attitudes towards nature and ourselves as well as the complexities and moral dilemmas of living in a techno consumerist world while simultaneously contributing to the earth’s ongoing environmental crisis. The FlâneuseIn Conversation with Artist Constance Mallinson ’66BY ANDREA DAWSONFor a painter, sculptor, and critic at the helm of the Los Angeles artmaking scene for more than 40 years, Constance Mallinson ’66 is disarmingly tender. She laughs easily. She explains the sociopolitical nuances of Postmodernism to a naive reporter with nary a hint of annoyance. It should come as no surprise that she has been a skilled teacher of her craft for nearly as long as she has been a successful practitioner. By her own admission, however, her gentle manner belies a contrarian streak. Fake ID in hand, she began sneaking into the beatnik coffee houses of Washington, D.C. in the early 1960s, one of the few venues at the time daring to showcase contemporary art, a stone’s throw from the National Gallery of Art. Ever since, she has channeled a certain edge, an intense desire to remain engaged, relevant and curious; to make her viewers think. As one Los Angeles Times critic wrote, her interest is “in exploring art that [lies] outside the dominant canon.” She often counsels her students: It’s ok to be a little angry. Los Angeles in the 1970s and ’80s was fertile ground for artists, and Constance—who relocated to California with her filmmaker husband in 1979—flourished. Before long, she became an integral contributor to the largely female-driven Pattern & Decoration Movement, which sought to question the rigid norms of Minimalism by injecting feminist flair. At a 2020 Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art exhibition, the first of its kind—“With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art, 1972–1985”—she was among the artists featured. Acknowledging the nature of the exhibition as a historical survey, she laughed, “I never anticipated being historical!” Constance’s involvement in the movement is but one chapter in a fearless and ever-evolving artistic career. Over the last four decades, her repertoire of work and accolades in Los Angeles—not to mention prolific teaching at numerous colleges and universities in southern California—are testament to her enduring mark on the West Coach art world. From the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art to the San José Museum of Art, her paintings can be seen in major private and public art collections across California.Here, Constance, 73, a mixed-media representational artist and a committed flâneuse (her word), shares early career memories at St. Agnes and in D.C.; the challenges she has faced as a female artist and mother; her deep concern for the environment; and what keeps her pursuing her craft, nearly 50 years after her first gallery exhibit. Your St. Agnes senior yearbook entry indicates how admired you were among classmates and faculty alike for your artwork. As art editor of the 1966 “Lamb’s Tail,” you designed and drew the cover and dividers. Clearly, art was important to you at an early age. What led you to pursue art as a career?CM: It was a combination of factors. My parents were very encouraging and, later, my schoolmates. I had art lessons from a very early age with a local art star in Alexandria. There was an older woman, Ms. Downs, at St. Agnes who taught art, but it was extracurricular. Art was pretty marginalized in those days at school; it took a back seat to music. I remember staying up late working on my oil paintings on the kitchen counter just because I wanted to. It was really important to me. I sold my first painting at St. Agnes, to an administrator, I think—it was a pastoral scene with some big trees and sheep. I’ll never forget how excited I was. So, you combine my passion with the encouragement and serious instruction I received, and it all adds up to a drive. I was pretty confirmed by the middle of high school that this is what I really wanted to do. Washington, D.C. is also a great museum town. I would often take the bus for an hour to get to the Mall and spend the whole afternoon at the National Gallery, looking at the Rembrandts and Monets. And I’d sneak into the beatnik coffee houses, where they hung edgy art and played bongos and jazz. For a 14-year-old that was an amazing eye-opener. I realized then that there was this very cool contemporary art scene going on. That was a big part of my early education as well. You received a BFA from the University of Georgia in 1970. What led you to Los Angeles?CM: I had planned to pursue a master’s degree after college, but I got married and my husband, Eric, and I started a business. He was a filmmaker and we made documentary and informational films for the government. It was really fun. I have a picture of Eric with Jimmy Carter for a film we did for the Department of Energy. I also had my first serious studio right after college, which I continued to maintain while we worked. And I was exhibiting. Then I got a lucky break. I entered a competition and the head curator of the National Gallery was the judge. The award, which I received, was an exhibition at the Alexandria Athenaeum. He also recommended me to a renowned gallerist who owned a contemporary gallery in D.C., Henri Gallery. I started showing with her pretty regularly. We had our film business for 12 years, but my husband got antsy to be in Hollywood. In 1979 we moved out to California. I was out of the film thing at that point, but I continued to do my art. It proved to be a very good move for me— Los Angeles had a much more lively, exciting contemporary art climate. I met a lot of artists, a lot of galleries were opening up. It was booming. I didn’t look back. It was a provocative time in Los Angeles, not to mention across the United States—the Women’s Movement, the Civil Rights Movement, the Feminist Art Movement, Minimalism, the Pattern & Decoration Movement. In what ways did these movements factor into your early career? CM: They factored into my career quite a bit. Contemporary art is really about channeling the zeitgeist through your personal lens into the artwork. I was very involved with Feminism, which had a big presence in Los Angeles. The Pattern & Decoration Movement was based in a lot of feminist theory, arguing that Minimalism was entrenched at the time and pretty male-dominated; it was against any personal narrative. Art had to be cold and clinical. Then the feminists came along and said hey, we want to get personal here and tell our stories. Pattern & Decoration artists introduced color and pattern, and influences from women’s crafts, like weaving and textiles. Things that were considered lowly pursuits in the world of high art were radically introduced. In the early 1970s it was very difficult for female artists and artists of color to get museum shows. It was necessary to kill that system of “this is the movement and if you don’t fit into it, we’re not interested.” The idea that any one movement could prevail at any given time came to an end then. Pattern & Decoration was one of the last major art movements of the 20th century. Critics have praised your work for its willingness to push against and question artistic conventions. Do you agree? And what are you most interested in exploring through your work? CM: You have to consider that contemporary art, or the tradition of Modernism, relied on positioning itself outside of the prevailing taste. That notion of progress—of moving culture forward—has always attracted me. I’ve always wanted to have my finger on the pulse of the moment. I’m a bit of a contrarian. It fit. Hopefully I still have a bit of that in me. There are consistent threads you can point to in my work. It has constantly played on the line between abstraction and figuration. Most if not all of my work has figurative elements to it, but it also includes that “all-overness” of abstraction. The environmental crisis weighs so heavily on me, so I want to address those themes in my work. Sure, you can just make something nice for a wall, but that’s not enough for me. I like challenging content. What am I saying with this painting? How do I harness my formal strengths—the color, my technical skill and rendering, my composition—and say something at the same time? That’s the dance. The tension between the natural environment and global consumerist forces are an obvious through line in your work. You are well known for transforming cast-off plastic and other detritus found on your daily walks around Los Angeles into arresting, large-scale landscapes. How much of artmaking is for you, personally— a way to process your feelings and worries—and how much is intended as a statement for others to respond to?CM: As an artist, it’s your job to make people look at a painting. And once they’re looking at it, your job is to make them think. Ultimately, gauging the efficacy of what I’m doing is very hard, unless you have an opportunity to talk to viewers. Art viewers are pretty smart; they wouldn’t be [in a gallery or museum] if they didn’t want that kind of experience or enrichment. Artists aren’t going to stop Exxon from drilling for oil. We’re not going to stop corporations from cutting down the Amazon. But we are a link in the chain, the cultural chain that consists of artists, musicians, writers, journalists, politicians, volunteers. We’re contributing to the dialogue. It’s easier for me to process [environmental concerns] when I think of myself as part of something rather than as a sole actor. Artists are in a fairly unique position to bear witness to what’s going on. In an interview a few years ago you addressed the challenge of being a female artist—and a mother—and navigating the perceptions surrounding those two identities. What was that like?CM: Very challenging. I was raising two daughters and balancing my professional life, and I was teaching, too. I just powered through it. I don’t know how I did it, frankly. Then there is the undeniable dissing of mothers. And a desire to be taken just as seriously when you’re driving your kids to soccer practice as before you had children. There was a long stretch when I was not finding a lot of opportunities to exhibit. I had my studio at home, so I was fortunate. While they were at school I would work for six hours. What fell off for me was the socializing and the connection-making. You can’t keep going to art parties when you’re raising kids. Once they’re through college and they leave the house, your time is your own. It’s important to communicate to young women and students that [motherhood and a professional life] are not mutually exclusive but mutually supportive. But you’ve got to be really organized and determined. I’m sure you had a notion when you graduated from college—or perhaps earlier—of what life as an artist might look like. What part of that vision has come true, and what has ultimately been different from what you anticipated? CM: When you’re 21 it’s like, bring on the world! I never really questioned myself significantly in terms of my drive and my desire to be in the studio. That was always number one. I knew I had to focus and create the work in order to have a career. I also knew I wanted to have a good time. Artists are a lot of fun—there’s lots of partying and a lot of camaraderie. I made it a point to meet other artists and still do to this day. I love the social life that goes along with knowing these incredible people. As far as expectations of fame and glory, we lived through the Warhol fascination and The Factory. That was the popular sense at the time of what an artist’s life was about. That wasn’t why I felt I was in it; I’ve never been a celebrity person. It doesn’t interest me. But at the same time, if that’s the prevailing age, you have to struggle with how you see yourself versus what the culture expects. Do you want to be a TikTok star or do something else? That is today’s analogy. It takes a little courage to follow your own instincts and do what you think is important, what is more you. The community part I was also not prepared for as a younger artist, where it’s all about “me.” Then you find, of course, that community is really important. Today, the art world is much bigger than I ever thought it would be, and there is so much more competition. More MFAs are graduating. Not only are you trying to maintain the momentum of your own practice, you have these upstarts who are trying to knock you off the mountain! The main things I have always been so gratified by are how much I personally love making art, the fabulous community of artists I belong to, and the never-ending excitement for the work that comes out. What are you working on now that excites you?CM: I just finished a piece that’s going to a big show next week [“Mapping the Sublime: Reframing Landscape in the 21st Century,” at the Brand Library & Art Center, through June 11]. It’s a hybridization of painting and sculpture, which is really intriguing to me at the moment. I’ve never worked in three dimensions before. I gathered blocks of styrofoam that I found on my walks and I painted on them all these endangered landscapes and animals. I got so sad making this thing I just had to quit at times! These little animals would be looking at me… It was very emotional. Hopefully the viewers who engage with the piece will be moved, too. That’s all I can do, really, is to move people to bear witness to our consumptive greed and habits. Also, as I get older, and now that I have had two children of my own, I want my artwork to engage younger people. This styrofoam piece will be mounted at kid-height on a pedestal. I’m still doing two-dimensional paintings as well. There’s a lot of freedom to experiment in the air, which appeals to me rather than sticking to tradition so strictly. One of the nice things about being at this stage in my career is that I just want to do what I want to do. I don’t need to please anyone but myself right now. When you look back on your career today, and remember yourself on the cusp of graduating from St. Agnes, what are some bits of wisdom you wish you had known then?CM: Well, there are all the clichés… cultivate your passion, water that garden, make sure it grows and is fertilized. There is no career without that. Have patience, gratitude, a good sense of humor, a willingness to erase and start over. Be curious. Be furious. Be mad when it serves you well. And remember, artmaking is meant to be enjoyed. If you’re not enjoying it, you shouldn’t be doing it. You will get discouraged. You will think you’re the worst artist in the world. That’s natural. Sometimes the plants that you’re watering every day will just die. But if you keep planting and nurturing, they will flourish. If you stick with it, it is a tremendously gratifying life to be an artist. Constance MallinsonLos Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (1991) Constance Mallinson is concerned with the mediation of landscape painting by photography, specifically the idealized, picturesque vista commonly associated with National Geographic and Life magazines. During the ’80s her explorations took the form of large grids of small landscape vignettes appropriated from photographic sources and then restructured to form larger pictographic panoramas. Such arrangements forced us to recognize our view of the landscape as a received, ideological doxa, in which nature is not only framed for the delectation of monocular perspective but also made safe, via notions such as the Sublime, reflecting an Enlightenment conception of subjectivity and faith in inevitable historical progress.However, the traditional framing of easel painting, with its retinally centered view of the landscape, tended to reinforce exactly what Mallinson was trying to deconstruct. In her latest project, an ambitious installation entitled Endless Painting, 1989–91, the vignettes are composed horizontally within 15 18-footlong panels arranged as a circular frieze around the entire gallery. The work’s subject is the history of the world, so Mallinson is able to indict our snapshot view of history and landscape (and, by extension, history-as-landscape) in a single blow. The frieze begins with the world’s primordial origins (a volcanic eruption) and gradually traces the evolution of civilization through mankind’s various monuments (the Pyramids, Stonehenge, Renaissance Venice) to the modern age (space, the atom bomb, freeway traffic jams). The work ends with an image of a sage old mountain goat gazing into an uncertain future (represented as blank space) as vignettes of the Gulf War and a mountain of tires bring up his rear. Mallinson’s achievement lies less in her ability to deconstruct historicism-as-representation than in the creation of a work that forces the viewer into undertaking the very kinds of reading that it also critiques. Instead of encouraging us to make choices, to privilege this over that, Mallinson deliberately reduces her subjects to nonhierarchical signifiers. It becomes less a pictorialism of metaphor and signification than one of multiplicity and flow. World War II, the creation of the world, and ancient Greek civilization all get the same space and attention regardless of their historical import. Rather than frame each vignette as a clearly delineated autonomous “event,” Mallinson blurs the edges so that each scene elides with the next. The obvious visual paradigm is the moving automobile, in which the landscape becomes a series of fragmentary instances in an endless pictorial and semantic drift. History and landscape are thus transformed into remembered icons and allegorical ruins, so that major historical events, natural phenomena, and the landscapes of, say, Claude Lorrain and Caspar David Friedrich are reduced to the same photoarchival function as photojournalism and the travelogue. All power lies in the hands of the allegorist, whether it be Mallinson, the viewer, or an advertising art director.Yet a closer reading discloses discreetly hidden formalisms in which Mallinson employs metonymic association to create metatexts that crisscross the dominant historical chronology, creating new trajectories. Thus a simple signifying continuum including a dust bowl, a TVA power station, a Nazi rally, a fighter plane, an atomic explosion, and a statue of Maocan all be recontextualized as a power chain (natural, industrial, political, military, nuclear, ideological), which also signifies a transition from a prewar-regulated economy to a postwar society of the spectacle. Similarly, Mallinson’s use of a recurring horizon line acts as a formal continuity between vignettes, reiterating the cone-of-vision perspective of traditional landscape painting as the dominant visual template for the frieze as a whole. What seemed to be a pictorialism of filmic flow is now revealed to stubbornly cling to the pictorial language of 16th-century painting. In true Nietzschean fashion, Mallinson transforms history into art, only then to disclose and celebrate art as deception and lies.—Colin Gardner Constance Mallinson “Small Works” and “Still Lifes in Landscapes”r d f aSep. 23 – Oct. 28, 2023 In her first solo exhibition since the acclaimed “Unmade” in 2017, Mallinson known for her epic scaled paintings of life sized accumulations of post-consumer found objects, changes course in a new series of small scaled but equally impactful paintings, some no larger than 6” square. Working on a small scale rather than the epic scale so favored in contemporary art, the artworks will have a greater accessibility with opportunities for a more intimate interaction –more akin to devotional objects – in which to contemplate the themes the artist engages...The exhibition features a diverse group of small works composed from natural and manufactured detritus Mallinson has collected from the streets on her daily walks through her neighborhood and appropriated photographic landscapes. Furthering Mallinson’s interests in formal painterly inventiveness--evidenced by the constant play between abstraction and figuration --and the climate change crisis, a fantastical assortment of post-consumer items are deftly layered with depictions of endangered landscapes such as melting glaciers, Amazonian rainforest and its creatures, and coral reefs, to create landscape/ still life hybrids. Also, on view in a Duchampian mode are a number of paintings based on “found abstractions”. The rich details, dazzling color, variety of objects and interplay of forms recall both 17th century Dutch still life painting and the historical pastoral landscape tradition. Mallinson references these traditions and their colonialist and exploitive associations while inviting comparisons to our current hyper consumerist world that is destroying valuable ecosystems and contributing to irreversible climate change. For example in Jungle Crossing and Party Decorations shiny mylar party decorations pulled from local trashbins hang down like seductive evil vines over a rendering of the notorious Darien Gap crossing in the Central American jungle, the implication being that while desperate migrants risk their lives, Americans party oblivious of the global impact we are creating through mindless and exploitive consumerism. Similarly, in Hot Pink Bunny in Greenland, a plastic Jeff Koons style balloon bunny sits atop a melting glacier dripping pink sweat into the ice floes. Works such as these suggest wealthy countries—and artists are part of the scheme-- are making and consuming expensive baubles while Rome burns. Past, present and future are evoked, prompting questions concerning the complexities and moral dilemmas of living in a techno- consumerist, disposable world as we simultaneously contribute to its demise. Post-apocalyptic, darkly humorous, critical and celebratory all at once, Mallinson’s images of shiny bright commodities and fragments thereof superimposed over lush but fragile landscapes situate viewers in a provocative endgame. CONSTANCE MALLINSON BIOGRAPHY SOLO EXHIBITIONS:2018 Museum of Art and History, Lancaster, California2017 “Unmade” Jason Vass Gallery, Los Angeles2015 “Free Painting” Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, California2012 Culver Art Center, UC Riverside, Riverside,Ca. “Matters of Decay”2009 Pomona College Museum of Art “Project Series”2009 Angles Gallery, Santa Monica 2002 National Academy of Sciences, Washington,D.C.1991 "Endless Painting," Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Los Angeles, California1988 "Solo Exhibition," Ace Gallery, Los Angeles, California1985 "Solo Exhibition," Ovsey Gallery, Los Angeles, California1983 "Solo Exhibition," Ovsey Gallery, Los Angeles, California1981 "Solo Exhibition," Ovsey Gallery, Los Angeles, California1970 "Solo Exhibition," Northern Virginia Fine Arts Association, Alexandria, VA GROUP EXHIBITIONS:2019 The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, “Pattern Painting” “Regime” Durden and Ray Gallery, Los Angeles Edward Cella Gallery, Los Angeles, California, “Vernacular Environments” “Valley Girls” Brand Library Art Galleries, Glendale, California2018 “The Feminine Sublime” Pasadena Museum of California Art, Pasadena, Ca. “Artists Choose Artists” Durden and Ray Gallery, Los Angeles “L.A. Looking” , Lava Projects, Los Angeles, California “Detritus”Arena One Gallery, Santa Monica, California “Elysium”, Inland Empire Museum of Art, Upland, California2017 “The Art of Politics in L.A.” Brand Library, Glendale, California “Into Action”, Into Action Spring Street Galleries, Los Angeles, California “Los Angeles Painters”, Bruno David Gallery, St. Louis, Missouri “Book Club”, Durden and Ray Gallery, Los Angeles, California “Nature” Launch Gallery, Los Angeles, California2016 “Urbanature” curated by Constance Mallinson Artcenter College of Design, Pasadena,Ca. “Picasso’s Bastards”, Woodbury University Nan Rae Gallery, Burbank, California2015 “After Living in the Room of Realities Nouvelle” Sonce Alexander Gallery, Santa Monica, California 2014 “The Wood Show”, Arena One Gallery, Santa Monica “The State of Portraiture” Autonomie Gallery, Los Angeles, Ca. “Spirits in the Material World”, Hiatus Gallery, Los Angeles Group Exhibition at Hilton Foundation, Agoura, California Group Exhibition, California Lutheran University, Simi Valley, California2013 “Pretty Vacant”, Los Angeles (curated by Yvette Gellis with Jann Williams) “Resonating Images” Cal Lutheran University “The Desert Show” Hudson and Linc, Los Angeles “Dangerous Beauties” Sturrt Haaga Gallery, Descanso Gardens, Pasadena, Ca. “The Four Seasons” Heather James Gallery, Palm Desert, California “Decomposition”, Fellows of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles “Arranged Art” Hudson/Linc, Los Angeles “Small Works”, Ruth Bachofner Gallery2012 “The Nature of Things” Ruth Bachofner Gallery, Santa Monica “True Blue” Sangria Gallery, Los Angeles “Unnatural” Los Angeles Municipal Gallery, Los Angeles Torrance Art Museum “To Live and Paint in L.A.” 2011 “Second Nature” Zask Gallery, Palos Verdes, California “Landscape Now”Andi Campagnone Projects, Pomona California “Urbanature” On-line Exhibition Times Quotidian.com2010 Raid Projects, Los Angeles, California, 3 person exhibition The Grey Wall, Alias Book, Los Angeles, California 2008 "Some Paintings" LA WEEKLY Biennial, Track 16 Gallery, Los Angeles2007 "Greener" Sketching Solutions For Climate Change, Symposium and Exhibition, Venice, Ca. 2007 "Coolglobes" Exhibition - City of Chicago2006 Torrance Art Museum “Plainer – A Contemporary Take on Landscape”Los Angeles Municipal Gallery “10 Years of C.O.L.A. Artists” (Traveling)Los Angeles International Airport Exhibitions “Endless Painting”2005 USC Fisher Gallery, “Contemporary Soliloquies on the Natural World” “In House Outside: Claremont Graduate School, Curated by David Pagel “The Poetics of Travel” LAX through LA Dept. of Cultural Affairs Claremont Graduate School, “Recent Feminist Art”2004 Los Angeles Municipal Gallery, “The Political Landscape”2003 Claremont Graduate School, “Nine Artists” The Art Gallery, Canoga Park, California: “Drawing A New Map” (Sept.) Rosamond Felsen “Los Angeles Pattern and Decoration” curated by Michael Duncan 2002 Japanese American Museum, Los Angeles, California C.O.L.A. 2002 recipients2001 A.P.E.. Gallery, Northhampton, Massachusetts Chase Foundation, Los Angeles, California2000 Alterart, Cambridge, Massachusetts Peter Blake Gallery, Laguna, Ca. “The New Landscape”1994 "The Layered Look," Santa Monica Museum, Santa Monica,.California1993 "Group Exhibition," Interart Gallery, New York New York Raleigh Corporation, Los Angeles, California1990 "Systems," Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Los Angeles, California1989 "Ace Contemporary Exhibitions," Ace Gallery, Los Angeles, California1988 "Ace Contemporary Exhibitions," Ace Gallery, Los Angeles, California "California Landscape Art: Plein Air to the Present," Downey Museum of Art, Downey, California1987 "A History of Women Artists in California," Fresno Art Museum, Fresno, California1986 "A Southern California Collection," Cirrus Gallery, Los Angeles, California "A Change of Art," Bank of Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California1985 "Artpark Artists," Buscaglia Castellani Gallery, New York, New York "Group Exhibition," Los Angeles Visual Arts, The Design Center, Los Angeles, California "Group Exhibition," Ovsey Gallery, Los Angeles, California "Landscape Now," University of California, San Angeles, California Seoul, Korea Angeles, California "Group Exhibition," Japanese American Culture PUBLIC COLLECTIONS:Pomona College Museum of ArtSan Jose Museum of ArtNational Academy of Sciences, Washington,DCBMI Software, Houston, TexasSecurity Pacific Bank, Los Angeles, CaliforniaNewport Harbor Art Museum, Newport Beach, CaliforniaNat West Markets, Los Angeles, CaliforniaPrudential Insurance Company, Los Angeles, CaliforniaAmerican Golf Corporation, San Diego, CaliforniaSheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton, Los Angeles, CaliforniaLos Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CaliforniaWilshire Grand Hotel, Los Angeles, Ca. (Mural) AWARDS AND GRANTS and PUBLIC ART2013 Expo Line 26th and Olympic Bergamot Station Installation2011 Santa Fe Art Institute, Residency Award, Santa Fe, NM2007 Finalist, Metro Mural for El Monte Station2007 Finalist, Branch Martin Luther King Branch Library, Los Angeles2007 Coolglobe, Chicago, Illinois2001 City of Los Angeles Artist Grant (C.O.L.A.)2001 Finalist Santa Monica Cultural Affairs Public Art Commission2000 Finalist King County Public Art Program, Water Control District Project1998 Finalist California Supreme Court Mural Competition1996 Los Angeles Metropolitan Transit Authority Red Line Poster Winner1994 Finalist Sunland Tujunga Branch Library1986 National Endowment for the Arts, Artist Fellowship1985 ARTPARK Lewiston, New York, Project Artist1984 Djerassi Foundation, Residency Award, Palo Alto, CaliforniaSELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHYBrewer, Gary “Studio Visit with Constance Mallinson, Art and Cake June 2019Interview on “Savvy Painter” Podcast, February 2019 and continuing“Forest for the Trees” Exhibition Catalog, Museum of Art and History, Lancaster, Ca.2017Mallinson, Constance, “The Feminine Sublime Exhibition Catalog”, Pasadena Museum of Ca. Art 2018 Heitzman, Lorraine, “The Feminine Sublime”, Art and Cake, 02/2018Mizota, Sharon, Review of “The Feminine Sublime” at Pasadena Museum,, L.A. Times 05/29/18Enholm, Molly, “The Feminine Sublime”, Fabrik Magazine, 05/08/2018Bowen, Bliss, “Pasadena Weekly, “Bold Perspectives on Nature and the Environment” 01/2018Gipe, Lawrence, Review in White Hot Magazine 7/9/2017Osberg, Annabel, Review in Artillery Magazine, 9/19,/2017Zellen, Jody, Review in Art and Cake, 06/2017Knight, Christopher, Review of Brand Library Exhibition,L.A. Times, 12/2017Dambrot, Shana Nys, Catalog for Exhjbition L.A. Painters, Bruno David Gallery Saint Louis 2017Argonaut News Radio, June 1, 2016 “Station to Station”KPCC News Radio,”Expo Line Atworks” 5/20/2016Seed, John, “Free Painting”, The Huffington Post, Dec. 2015Spiller, Nancy “measuring True Worth”, Arroyo Magazine 10/2015Barrie, Lita: “Dangerous Beauties, A double Take on Nature” Artweek LA July 2013Brown, Betty: “Pretty Vacant” Review; Artweek, L.A. Nov. 21, 2013Enholm, Molly : “Dangerous Beauties”, Art Ltd. July/August 20013Drohojowska, Hunter Segment of KCRW’s Art Talk, April 2012Frank, Peter “Un-Natural” Fabrik Magazine Issue 16, Spring 2012 Huffington Post, Haiku Reviews, April 28, 2012Brown, Betty, “Un-Natural” ArtScene, Vol.31 No.9 May 2012Harvey,Doug “Pierre and the Lion” LA Weekly, May 20, 2010Harvey,Doug “Snips and Snails” La Weekly, Sept. 11, 2010Valencia, Rita “The Times Quotidian” Oct. 2009Ollman,Leah, "So Very Natural,Yet So Theatrical", LA Times, Feb.6,2009Miles, Christopher: Constance Mallinson at Angles Gallery, LA Weekly Jan. 30,2009Knight, Christopher : It's Alive With Wit and Diversity, LA Times, Jan. 25,2008Harvey, Doug, "Some Paintings" LA Weekly, Jan 11,2008 Pagel, David,Los Angeles Times, January 9,2006 “Each to Her Own Nature” Los Angeles Times, April 27,2004 “Our Place in the World” Los Angeles Times, June 8,2002 “Pop The Next Wave”Frank, Peter LA Weekly, January 20-26,2006 “Contemporary Soliloquies on the Natural World” LA Weekly, April 9,2004 “The Political Landscape”Miles, Christopher “P&D in LA” Art in America Feb. 2004New American Painting,Number 31, Open Studios Press, Wellesley, 4 Massachusetts Dunlap, Doree “The Golden Land” OC Weekly, March 8, 1996Frank, Peter, Artpick, L.A. Weekly, (January 19, 1995)Los Angeles Times, Sunday Calendar, "Biennial LAX '94," (November 13, 1994).Wilson, William, "Layered," Los Angeles Times, (November 30, 1994). Rhoads, Thomas,"The Layered Look:Towards An Aesthetic Of Accumulation Among 6 L.A. Artists" published by Santa Monica Museum of Art for LAX '94.Ribot Magazine, (Winter, 1993) and Spring 1995 issuesGardner, Colin, "Review," Artforum, (November, 1991).Darling, Michael, "Bittersweet Constance Mallinson at L.A. Municipal Gallery," Artweek, (10/24/91).Knight, Christopher, "Dazzling View of the American Landscape," L.A. Herald Examiner, (December 1, 1988).Curtis, Cathy, "Review," Los Angeles Times, (July, 1988).(Prior to 1988 available by request) In Conversation: Constance Mallinson and Rebecca Lowery (MOCA) The rise of the feminist movement and the globalism that exposed US audiences to other cultures were two energizing forces for artist Constance Mallinson, coinciding with the artist’s late-1970s move to Los Angeles. Mallinson worked downtown, creating paintings and drawings that channeled the form and logic of weaving. She focused her attention on employing pattern as a bridge between minimalist aesthetics and a more personal and feminine approach as part of the Pattern and Decoration art movement. Mallinson joins MOCA Assistant Curator Rebecca Lowery in a conversation about her practice then, now, and in the context of the exhibition With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972–1985.

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End Time: 2024-09-21T18:00:39.000Z

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