Heidi Herrera
Cataloguer
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Lot 21
TIMOTHY MUTZEL(B. 1968)Parallel, 2025
23 April – 2 May 2025, 12:00 PDT
Online, Los AngelesSold for US$3,328 inc. premium
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Sharon Squires
Head of Department, Post-War & Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
Bids (US)
TIMOTHY MUTZEL (B. 1968)
Parallel, 2025
signed, titled and dated (on the reverse)
acrylic, flashe, colored pencil and graphite on canvas
39 1/2 x 44 in.
100.3 x 111.8 cm.
signed, titled and dated (on the reverse)
acrylic, flashe, colored pencil and graphite on canvas
39 1/2 x 44 in.
100.3 x 111.8 cm.
Footnotes
Provenance
Courtesy of the artist
"For me, each piece is a kind of divination, I use mark-making to learn about what I am. There's a sort of "channeling" that seems to happen when I make the art. This piece is about the potential for parallel universes. It prescribes an antidote for the ominous feeling that we've slipped into one that's more than a little off. Hatred and intolerance don't rule in this parallel universe I've discovered, they don't make sense here." -Timothy Mutzel
Artist Statement: Marking up a surface, I imagine I'm exploring the nature from which we're all made—chemical bonds conjured up from seemingly random patterns of light. Painting and drawing engage multiple senses—the energy radiating to the brush or pencil and reverberating back, the torque and weight of the line, how easily it flows—noticing how thoughts are influenced by these sensations and stimulated by the marks seen. As the various frequencies and patterns merge, preferences for certain curves, colors and textures are formed. A narrative begins—an argument needs to be resolved.
The process engenders conceptual word-thoughts for me. My art practice facilitates analytical thinking although I imagine and follow idiosyncratic rules, maybe subconscious, maybe physiological, to help channel and direct the flow of my work.
A quirk of movement can create a mark that, in an instant, becomes the driving force of an artwork. Gestural shapes take form as fantastical beasts. Many evolve to depict multiple forms in a vast arrangement of psychological space. From the imagery that guides me through a picture to the intersection between my own physical body and the making of the art, the artwork's dependency on who and what I am for its creation illuminates me. I treat this as a form of divination.
Thinking about the visual data transcribed on a surface takes me inside the mind that I inhabit. I play a lot with phenomenological space, observing my reality, trying to delineate the connection between the world outside and within. I have an almost neurotic emotional memory of gestures and textures. Working with the marks I make, I discover horns, bodies, fur—immense structures can spring into being.
Matter and energy, to be represented with quick lines or labored shapes, sometimes flat and graphic, sometimes modeled, sometimes gouged or scratched. Set down in various ways, the rendering is always subordinate to the patterns, colors and lines of energy it's derived from and contained within—an article of clothing worn, reflecting back the world of its wearer. Patterns, order, chaos and sunshine pop into being, diverting your attention for a moment as a story is told.