Daniel Mullen investigates how we perceive the world through relationships between color, light, form, and matter. His work proposes an active viewing experience in which perception shifts as the body moves, light changes, and space reorganizes itself around the observer.
Daniel Mullen (Glasgow, Scotland, 1985) lives and works in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Trained in Fine Arts at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie (Amsterdam, 2011), he develops a practice that begins with geometric abstract painting and expands into sculpture and installation, with sustained attention to the ways in which color and light shape the viewer's perception. In Mullen's work, the artwork is understood as a field of experience: meaning emerges in the encounter between surface and depth, object and environment, and the gaze and presence of the observer.
In his paintings, built up in thin, translucent layers of acrylic on raw linen, Mullen works with a deliberately restricted palette, often limited to three primary pigments, to investigate how subtle chromatic and structural variations can produce significant perceptual shifts. Rectangles, grids, and repeated modules function as a compositional axis and, at the same time, as devices for generating depth, optical instability, and rhythms that never fully stabilize. This layered use of glazes stems from the artist's education at a Rudolf Steiner school, where he learned the technique known as veil painting. An almost architectural precision coexists with the presence of the hand: the canvases appear digital from a distance but reveal the manual process on closer inspection. His research engages with traditions such as the Bauhaus, the color studies of Johannes Itten and Josef Albers, California's Light and Space Movement, and the legacy of concrete and neo-concrete abstraction.
In recent years, Mullen has expanded these questions into three-dimensional space, with sculptures in mirror-polished stainless steel, reliefs in painted MDF and pigmented porcelain. Taken together, abstraction operates as a language capable of connecting references ranging from modernist architecture to spirituality and digital languages, without being reduced to a single narrative.
The artist's relationship with Brazil deepened in 2025 with the solo exhibition nada isolado / nothing in isolation at Zipper Galeria, preceded by (In)Visible Within (Zipper Galeria, 2022). In addition to Zipper Galeria, he has held solo exhibitions at FEMA (Cascais), Heart Ego (Mexico), Enlace (Lima, 2023 and 2025), Galeria Kogan Amaro (Zurich), Marian Cramer Projects (Amsterdam), Privateview Gallery (Turin), Appels Gallery (Amsterdam), and Elan Fine Art (Vancouver). His group exhibitions include Color of Sound at the Sun Valley Museum of Art (Idaho, 2023), the Bienal de Curitiba at the Museu Oscar Niemeyer (2020), the OSTRALE Biennale (Dresden, 2019), the Aesthetica Art Prize at York Art Gallery (2019), and Radiating Spaces at the Direktorenhaus Museum (Berlin, 2017). He has undertaken residencies at the European Ceramic Work Centre (Oisterwijk, 2023), Casa Lu (Mexico City, 2022), the Wassaic Artist Residency (New York, 2022), and the FAMA Foundation (Itu, 2019). He received the audience award at the Summer Show of Nieuw Dakota and Francis Boeske Projects (Amsterdam, 2017) and was nominated for the Aesthetica Art Prize (2016 and 2019), the Dutch Royal Prize for Painting (2014), and the Buning Brongers Prize for Painting (2012). His work is held in institutional and corporate collections in Brazil and abroad, including FAMA Museum (Itu), Schlumberger (Houston), Erasmus MC, Aegon, Akzo Nobel, and Sanquin Bloodbank (the Netherlands), Hughes Hubbard & Reed LLP (Miami), Edison Investment Research (London), and Pace Architects (Kuwait).