HUDSON REVIEW
Michael Mulhern “Ash and Stone”
by Karen Wilkin, March 2004
It is their raw, physical “abstractness” that carries these associations, the nuances of color and surface, the shifts of gesture and line, and the adjustments of interval and density that engage your eye…
Mulhern’s elusive paintings, both on canvas and paper, were continuations of his recent exploration of layering, concealment, and excavation as metaphors for lived experience and the construction of self. Subtly modulated expanses of dull, metallic, aluminum grey, applied with broad gestures, bury layers of wispy calligraphic marks, which survive mainly as memories but occasionally escape at the edges, haunt the thinnest passages, or are retrieved by scraping out.
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