art

70s 80s 90s 00s 10s photography postcards pastels drawings      film/video punk  performance  visionary/shamanic  other

MOST RECENT SHOW:

PAUL McMAHON INSTALLATION:
‘PRE-OCCUPIED’

NOV 26-DEC 23
ROOS ARTS
449 MAIN ST. ROSENDALE
718-755-4726  info@roosarts.com

images of art works, roughly chronological from 1970-2007               Lecturing at Otis Art Institute, LA, 2010
MY WISH is from PAUL McMAHON on Neutral Records, 1986

the met

After over 30 years without much of an art career, over 30 of my works were shown in a group of over 30 artists at the Metropolitan Museum in 2009. THE PICTURES GENERATION 1974-1984 traced the development of a new, post-conceptual sensibility which came to prominence in the art world of the 80s and beyond.
Unexpected acclaim for local Mail Carrier
Fast payday loans For Every One

installation photos: Eileen Travell


As a last minute fill-in for the show’s curator, Douglas Eklund, I was asked to accept the award on behalf of the Metropolitan for Best Museum Group Show of the Year in Rob Pruitt’s First Annual Art Awards at the Guggenheim.

“While I’m usually bored by men’s fashion, yet another inspired look was a chap from the Met with flowing white hair, fabulously turned out in plum velvet.”

shows 2009-11

Following the Metropolitan show I’ve been in several shows in and out of NYC:

STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN

PAUL McMAHON, MATT MULLICAN, JAMES WELLING     1970-75

SUSAN INGLETT GALLERY

SUMMER 2010

“STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN” Each summer, David Platzker, the director of the art-ephemera gallery Specific Object, unearths a time-capsule exhibition at the Inglett gallery. This year’s effort is devoted to a trio of artists who met at Cal Arts in its seventies heyday: Matt Mullican, James Welling, and Paul McMahon. Most of the work comes from the artists’ archives and dates, more or less, from that era. Mullican shows cartoon cutouts of evanescence (smoke, ice), along with examples of his stick-figure drawings, which put a mystical spin on Pop. Welling’s experimental photographs graft together Surrealism, Robert Frank, and Ed Ruscha. McMahon’s postcard collages transform banal buildings, industrial landscapes, and stranger subjects (including beached whales) into icons of the uncanny. Through July 24. NEW YORKER, In the Galleries

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PRECONCEIVED ICONOGRAPHY

MUSEUM 52

APRIL 2010

OTHER RECENT GROUP SHOWS:

CALLICOON FINE ARTS OPENING SHOW, FALL 2009


NAIVE AMERICAN

ROOS ARTS; MADE IN ROSENDALE; SUMMER 2010

Above: SOLO SHOW AT ALCHEMY CAFE, Bearsville, August-September 2009 NEW POSTCARD PIECES. This show featured a new series of works made of copies of the same postcard taped together, a technique begun in 1971.

70s

Claremont gas stations (1970, photo transparencies overlapped) was the first piece I made which I now think of as Disorientalism, a central tenet of my work of the 70s and 80s. It was an accident, like many of my more fortunate ‘achievements.’ I was photographing gas stations for Hal Glicksman’s art history class and I overexposed the film, making it all washed out. So I layered two hoping in some way to get a viewable image and voila!

The same thing happened that summer when I took a picture of my girlfriend and she took a picture of me.

1970

swimsuit fan 1975 collection gib smith

Vermont 1971

sailboats/pelicans 1973

dodospaceman 1974

In 1973 I began to color on newspapers with pastel.

blue horse 1974 collection matt mullican


Nixon Resigns, 1975 Collection Cindy Sandmann

Engagement Rings, 1975 Collection Donald Newman (originally stolen by Donald from Muranushi-Lederman in 1993 and eventually paid for, many years later, for far more than the original sales price.

…and collages

beach/face plexi 1974

Shortly after moving to NYC in 1975 I began writing on postcards.

LOSS 1975 Collection Metropolitan Museum

DEATH WISH 1975 Collection Metropolitan Museum

Shortly thereafter I started cutting and pasting.

Butterfly Man 1975

Train/Family 1976

I also started making drawings.

One artist trying to convince others that he is right       1975

Bumble Bee March 1977 black marker

College Sweatshirt                               1976

I drew on other types of photos.

green nude 1978 china marker over playboy centerfold collection Bebetta Campeti

Have a Nice Day, 1986 print of 1977 piece,
Strother Elwood editions, Collection Whitney Museum

The Punk Moment 1977-79

Spray paint and stencils

mostly 1977

Channeled Collaboration with Marcel Duchamp begins, 1977, aided by Richard Prince

80s

ongoing series begun in 1977; red polka dots on white ground, acrylic on wood panel

I figured that if you only do one thing over and over you will automatically be a success in the art world. Envious of my friends’ financial success, I decided I’d just do the red dot paintings and have a good income. I lasted about a week. Recently my uncle Will Barnet told me Adolph Gottlieb had given him the same advice; just do one thing over and over and you’ll be a success. At least he took his own advice.