George Mueller

Art Brokerage: George Mueller American Artist: b. 1929-2021. As an abstract expressionist painter still in his early twenties, Mueller won the attention of New York art critics in the mid-late 50's. He certainly looked the part: tall, lank, intense, beautiful, irreverent, smart. He drank, smoked and could stare into cameras. He could also paint. Fresh from Cooper Union, Mueller was signed by Borgenicht Gallery and had seemingly found his niche in the New York marketplace. The new edge was already sharpening a "popsima" on soup cans, cartoons, and perfume bottles as the crustier New York School painters began to show a profit. By the 70's, however he had tuned into a different station. He found his own expression and the harsh repercussions of a complex marketplace simultaneously. His dealer, uncomfortable with Mueller's new hard-edged, geometric experimentation and not encouraged by this new look which had not yet been condoned by critics or collectors, encouraged the earlier paintings reminiscent of his friend Motherwell; painterly, abstract, loose. In the late 70's his canvases became large (9ftx18ft) and the subject matter, architectural fragments, uninhabited porches of old style houses set against the repeating facades of apartment complexes and Newark streets. They were painted with painstaking hard edge precision that resembled photo realism only in it's careful detail. The compositions themselves sank spaces where spaces were unlikely to be or created false relationships that promised one thing but delivered something else. Hardened extremes in shadows and light suggest Hopper without Hopper's characteristic figures. Listings wanted.