Image of Nicole Mueller’s warehouse studio in San Francisco while working on a large painting commission
Nicole Mueller is a full-time visual artist based in San Francisco, CA. Her work includes large-scale paintings, murals, and installations that mimic the effects of stained glass. Driven by process, her abstract works are highly saturated, built with layers of collage-like shapes. Her work explores the complexity of color, states of flux, dichotomies within painting, the transitional nature of being, and the threshold between interior and exterior, the tangible and intangible.
Mueller earned her BFA in Painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore, MD in 2011. Her work has been exhibited in California, New York, and Maryland. She has been an artist-in-residence at the Pouch Cove Foundation (Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada), ArtPoint (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco), the Vermont Studio Center, and Proyecto ‘ace (Buenos Aires, Argentina). She has completed permanent public projects in collaboration with the City of Alameda, California Arts Council and Downtown Alameda Business Association, as well as commercial businesses throughout San Francisco. In 2017 she was the recipient of the Mark M. Glickman and Lanette M. McClure Artist Award for emerging artists in California.
Mueller is also co-host of Beyond the Studio, a podcast that interviews working contemporary artists about their professional practices. Beyond the Studio’s mission is to bring more transparency to the art world by hosting candid conversations with visual artists about their business practices, financial planning, time management, and the unique challenges of making a living, creatively. The podcast was the recipient of an Alternative Exposure grant in 2017, from Southern Exposure in San Francisco, with support from Facebook’s Artist-in-Residence Program and the Andy Warhol Foundation. Beyond the Studio is a cultural partner of Art World Conference, and a fiscally sponsored project of Independent Arts & Media.
To get in touch, please email: studio@nicolemariemueller.com
Recent interviews:
First Coat | The Side Woo | TurningArt In Studio | ShoutoutLA | gangSTAR* Creative | Art + Magic | Beyond the Studio | Visionary Projects | Wescover | Apartment Therapy
Image of Nicole Mueller in her San Francisco studio
Artist statement
Nicole Mueller’s paintings are vibrant and lyrical, filled with rhythmic gestures and pockets of deep space. Driven by process, her abstract works are built up through layers of transparent washes, sweeping brushstrokes, or spray painted in atmospheric hazes. They fill the canvases with color edge-to-edge, like sections of a more expansive world, teeming with portals and nebulous forms suspended in a state of flux. They are freeze-frames, on the verge of coalescing or breaking apart into amorphous shapes. Mueller’s expanded painting practice includes large-scale murals, public art, and installations that activate natural light with color.
These ever-shifting abstractions, though non-referential, feel like lush landscapes. They seem to reference something bodily or organic, with shapes or colors found in nature, while hyper-saturated neons and dancing gestures, though painterly, are exaggerated to the point of being graphic or even animated (early 2D cell-style animation from her ’90s era childhood are a primary influence).
But their complexity points to a deeper psychological landscape, one that is filled with dichotomies: the conflicting dance between one’s interior self and external persona, manifested through a combination of bold, decisive moves and appeasing colors mixed with elements of restraint. They urge the viewer to question: to what extent is the chaos portrayed deliberately composed, poised—or spontaneous event, in the way of her abstract expressionist predecessors?
Mueller’s paintings grasp for stability while searching for balance. Her paintings sit restlessly in an energetic state of transformation, caught between a desire to burst beyond the edges of the canvas, while at risk of collapsing in on themselves. Yet her paintings are effusive, exuberant, even joyful, as if they’ve embraced this state of perpetual flux. Their attitude is vibrant and unabashed, as if to remind us this state of constant change is not one to be feared, diminished, or merely passed through—but rather embraced wholeheartedly, to sit with and soak in this entangled space full of color and life.
Studio process
see more on Instagram @nicolemariemueller