On view in Mullen’s second exhibition with the gallery will be a range of the artist's colorful paintings with bold, graphic, interlocking shapes and swirls of tactile paint that reference text, advertisements and reproductions of artworks found in magazines and books from the library at Nurturing Independence Through Artistic Development (NIAD) in Richmond, California where Mullen has worked for many years. In his paintings, that read as modernist abstractions, the referent–whether it be a James Turrell light installation or Kate Hudson on the cover of Marie Claire magazine–is distilled, transformed and edited, often beyond recognition. While they withhold vital information, the paintings have a perseverance of legibility as they toggle between representation and abstraction or isolate a particularly poetic grouping of words.

Despite working far from its centers, Mullen and his paintings are in direct dialogue with the contemporary art world. In an untitled work from 2016, Mullen reproduces parts of Julien Ceccaldi’s I Am My Goals as seen on the cover of the 2014 summer issue of Artforum. Mullen’s interpretation prioritizes the graphic qualities of the cartoon and distills the original text to simply “I See.” In another work from 2017, Mullen creates a complex surface with a pink fleshy central form, the artist's rendering of a hand raised in protest, inspired by Wolfgang Tillman’s Black Lives Matter Protest, Union Square as seen on another Artforum cover. On view will be new works that have a range of sources from Horizon Magazine to Vincent Sheean's 1951 memoir of Edna St. Vincent Millay, the American poet and playwright.

Dino Matt, for his debut exhibition with the gallery, has created a group of hand-built ceramic sculptures, each an accumulation of hundreds of gestures or fragments of stoneware. The artist begins by making quick movements or marks with bits of clay that he then pieces together until they reveal their composition, often compact and volumetric. Matt then revisits the individual impressions, glazing each in a range of hues reminiscent of the southwest desert.

Existing between form and function, Matt’s sculptures suggest vases or vessels, but upend the notion of traditional craft with references to the avant-garde and the absurd. With their fragmented surfaces marked by holes and their emphasis on the raw materials and evocative color, the small-scale sculptures reveal the artist's visual and conceptual interests as explored through clay. While the sculptures have a contemporary archaeology aesthetic, where shards of pottery might be dug up and history pieced together, the works are also reminiscent of brushwork in an abstract painting or assemblage, where tangled parts resolve into an expressionist structure.