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) is a Scottish artist based in the Netherlands, where he lives and works in Amsterdam. He graduated in 2011 with a BFA from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, in Amsterdam, and has since developed a practice that begins with geometric abstract painting and expands into sculpture and installation, always focusing on the visual, spatial, and emotional perceptions generated by the interplay between color, light, form, and material. In his work, the artwork is understood as a field of experience: meaning emerges in the encounter between surface and depth, object and environment, gaze and the presence of the observer.
In his paintings—constructed in translucent layers of acrylic on raw linen—Mullen works with a deliberately restrained palette, often limited to three primary colors, to investigate how subtle chromatic and structural variations can activate significant perceptual shifts. Rectangles, grids, and repeated modules function as compositional anchors and, at the same time, as devices for generating depth, optical instability, and rhythms that never fully settle. Near-architectural precision coexists with the presence of the hand, making the canvases appear digital from a distance yet reveal their manual process up close. His research engages with traditions such as the Bauhaus, the color studies of Johannes Itten and Josef Albers, the California Light and Space Movement, and the legacies of concrete and neoconcrete abstraction.
In recent years, Mullen has expanded these concerns into three-dimensional space. In new series, he creates sculptures in mirrored stainless steel as well as painted MDF reliefs and pigmented porcelain works. Across this body of work, abstraction operates as a language capable of connecting references ranging from modernist architecture to spirituality and digital aesthetics, without reducing itself to a single narrative.
His relationship with Brazil deepened in 2025 with the solo exhibition “nada isolado — nothing in isolation” at Zipper Galeria. Beyond Zipper, the artist has presented solo exhibitions at institutions and galleries such as FEMA (Cascais), Galeria Kogan Amaro (Zurich), Elan Fine Art (Vancouver), Marian Cramer Projects (Amsterdam), Privateview Gallery (Turin), and Appels Gallery (Amsterdam). Group exhibitions include shows at the Sun Valley Museum of Art (Idaho), the Bienal de Curitiba, the OSTRALE Biennale (Dresden), the Light Forms Art Center (New York), as well as spaces such as Het Hem (Zaandam) and the Direktorenhaus Museum (Berlin).
Mullen has participated in residencies at the European Ceramic Work Center – EKWC (Oisterwijk), the FAMA Foundation (Itu), the Wassaic Artist Residency (New York), and Casa Lu (Mexico City). He was shortlisted for the Aesthetica Art Prize (2016 and 2019), the Dutch Royal Prize for Painting (2014), and the Buning Brongers Prize for Painting (2012), and received the Audience Award at the Summer Show at Nieuw Dakota and Francis Boeske Projects (Amsterdam, 2017). His work is part of institutional and corporate collections in Brazil and abroad, including FAMA Museum (Itu), Akzo Nobel, Aegon, Erasmus MC, Sanquin Blood Bank (Netherlands), Schlumberger (Houston), Hughes Hubbard & Reed LLP (Miami), Edison Investment Research (London), and Pace Architects (Kuwait).