PRESS RELEASE
NIGEL MULLINS | MANIFESTO
Sep 9 – Sep 26, 2026
NIGEL MULLINS
MANIFESTO
In ‘Manifesto’, a painterly exploration of art and art history, Nigel Mullins draws on the tenets of a number of Modern and contemporary artists. Making use of his signature sumptuous impasto, veering between figuration and abstraction, Mullins references ideals and concerns which characterise 20th and 21st century art movements, and which convey the turmoil and restlessness of our times. With their slogans and viscous smears of paint, his canvases serve as an apology, an explanation and a plea. They record human collective effort while acknowledging the tragic pattern of human history repeating itself.
As an artist who has long made use of self-reflexivity as a tool, Mullins has moved his focus squarely onto art as the principal subject and vehicle for seeing the world. The history of art – from Mesopotamia to the present day – may seem a limitless subject to digest, but Mullins here delves mostly into 20th century manifestoes and selected contemporary artists with a strong ideological approach and who use appropriation as a tool – something he himself clearly does too. Settling on artists with whom he felt an instinctive rapport, Mullins comments that “I felt like I was entering into conversation with these artists and movements, even just fleetingly, and ultimately use them to locate my own work, to embroil it in the history of art”. In creating his own chaotic, idiosyncratic manifesto – crammed into notebooks full of his hybrid slogans, phrases and ideas and then translated onto canvas and paper – Mullins found himself using his source material “as /vehicles for my own pseudo-political, superstitious, humanist propaganda.”
A consideration often serving as a touch-point for Mullins is: “If this painting was a magic talisman or religious icon, what would it do, what would I ask of it?” In examining the work of Joseph Beuys, Cindy Sherman and Ai Wei Wei (among others), Mullins treats historic art manifestoes similarly to his concept of talismans: he sees them as passionate, ritualistic attempts by humans to command the future and ward off existential dread through language and ideology. Mullins loves the strident utopianism of such manifestoes, coupled with the fact that things can change for the better – while acknowledging the messy, unresolved political realities of the present.
As well as reaching back into the past, one of the ploys Mullins makes use of here is to imagine citizens of the distant year 2226 standing in front of his work. This provokes in him a multiplicity of feelings and the simple desire to leave a message for them. “What would I possibly say to people 200 years from now?” he questions. “In short, this provokes curiosity about the future, the eternal and inescapable present and of course the past.” In previous bodies of work he has examined superstition, with all its shrines and rituals, both as an exploration of human foibles and drives, and as analogous to art and art making. In a mirroring of his investigations into the past, Mullins imagines the citizens of 2226 looking back at our current time and trying to come to terms with our own failures, our superstitions, anxieties, decisions, political and art movements. As Mullins has often used antique or vintage frames (to evoke the values we place in objects), or investigated forms of iconoclasm (such as the damaging of artworks by the suffragette movement or the toppling of statues by anti-colonial movements), he posits his own paintings as physical time capsules or messages in a bottle to the future, to be sent across centuries.
Through layering past, present and future densely on top of each other, Mullins addresses us with poignant self-awareness and asks us to view ourselves with the same humble curiosity, to perhaps rework our own manifestoes in face of the relentless flow of time. What we find in the work remains a sense of human turbulence, emotional momentum and shared purpose.
b.1969 Makhanda, South Africa
Nigel Mullins’s works present the disparate images of human existence as a compendium of fruitless tropes that have perpetrated, sustained and perpetuated Western culture since the 18th century. The works draw every sacralised view and arch-theory into question. Even the designation ‘human’, with its defining sets of ideologies, has become an obsolete remnant, exposing every pedagogue and hero, every defining character as, at the very most, ineffectual. The paintings reflect the enveloping totality of contemporary culture and posits it clearly as a deadlock between past and present. Mullins is currently based in Saint-Généroux, France.
