Night-bloom-8, 2011 - Gerben Mulder

The Dutch painter Gerben Mulder taps into the history of Expressionism and bends it to two very different ends, painting both dynamic still lifes of flowers that seem to explode on the canvas and moody, unsettling portraits of youths (often girls) in various states of undress. A lively, almost jaunty sense of motion characterizes his work, with unexpected colors and dash-likes strokes of paint giving a sense of vibrancy even to his darker compositions. Each of Mulder's lines, evoking leafs or limbs, seems to possess its own innate sense of directionality.

The artist is best known for his Flowers series (2010-2012), which reimagines the still-life concept through representations that waver ecstatically between the figurative and abstract, with velvety slashes of pastel bringing drama to his backgrounds. Mulder has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Tucson Museum of Contemporary Art (2011), Munich's Gallery K4 (2009), and Galeria Fortes Villaca in Sao Paulo, Brazil (2008).
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