Hoffman Donahue is pleased to present Marlon Mullen. Comprising new and previously unseen paintings, this solo exhibition is the artist’s first in Los Angeles, and his first since the survey exhibition Projects: Marlon Mullen at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (2024–2025). Developing over the past four decades, Mullen’s singular practice pulls from the pages of magazines, exhibition announcements, auction catalogues, and books, transforming the familiar visual language of the art world into paintings that hover between recognition and abstraction.

Mullen paints in acrylic on canvas laid flat on his studio table at NIAD (Nurturing Independence through Artistic Development) Art Center, a progressive arts organization in Richmond, CA for adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities, where Mullen has worked since 1986. Frequently borrowing from the on-site library, he treats his appropriated subjects less as pictures to reproduce and more as material to reorganize. In Mullen’s hands, words, barcodes, logos, and blocks of color may be enlarged, cropped, repeated, or omitted altogether. What began as an Artforum magazine cover, advertisement, or work by another artist gradually breaks apart into an entirely new system of shape, color, rhythm, and texture.

While this exhibition follows a period of increasing institutional recognition for Mullen, his striking oeuvre nonetheless resists easy categorization or summary as it continually shifts between information and image, legibility and obscurity, reference and invention.