Stephen Mueller
Annina Nosei Gallery
Until recently, Stephen Mueller was an insouciant painter who combined various pictorial syntaxesstaining, geometry, and gesture—to evoke those elusive states between reflection and action, chaos and definition, which Willem de Kooning called the “slippery glimpse.” Using saccharine colors such as pink, mauve, and purple, Mueller filled the bounded stillness of his compositions with a painterly hurly-burly, making abstract works that were simultaneously seductive and off-putting, brash and funny. Mueller never felt that painting had to confront the end of history or the medium’s own