Marlie Mul’s artistic practice is situated somewhere between sculpture, painting, print, fashion, distribution, writing, experiments in branding, the social, the flimsy and the virtual.
References to the flowing, the liquid, and the oozing, recur throughout Marlie Mul’s work, both formally and metaphorically – from folded paintings to flaccid silicone works implanted with thinning hairs, to facsimile sculptures of rain puddles and enquiries into the history of tobacco smoke. Her works are intricately fabricated while retaining a pronounced DIY character.
In May 2017, Marlie Mul publicly cancelled a solo exhibition at the Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA) in Glasgow, due to untenable working conditions, which prompted the promotion of said cancellation inside the galleries of the museum itself. In the aftermath, she co-initiated the counter-institutional fanzine ground together with writer and poet Harry Burke, and published the book CANCELLED in 2018.
With the project PMS, she explores a form of ‘branding-drag,’ using the accessible format of the t-shirt as a tool for circulating images and visualising community, with the brand taking the human body’s hormonal fluctuations as its theme.
On an irregular, leisurely schedule she runs HERMANY, a nomadic project space that seeks to blur the specificity of exhibition audiences by continuously varying its content, medium and location. Hermany has hosted the work of various artists and performers, and was also the project name under which she initiated the collective projects "Fashion Café" (2019) and "Fashion Time" (2022) wherein the spectacle of fashion was taken as a starting point for the making and presentation of art works. Since 2021 she works on various series of sculptures intricately made from silicone and (synthetic) hair.
Excerpt from the article "Leda and the Swan" in Spike Magazine (issue July 2021) by Max Henry on Marlie Mul's solo exhibition "Sperms Going to a Fashion Show" at Croy Nielsen Vienna in May 2021:
"As contemporary art diffuses into armchair sociology, there are nonetheless some constants to hang your hat on. It’s the good fortune of time immemorial that provocative artists take familiar things and pivot them with transgressive acts to shock the senses. Take the cryptic art of Marlie Mul. Diffident she is not. She crafts innocuous-looking objects in various stages of construction that melt and terraform like 3D prints stuck in an outmoded software program. Something in her sculptures has gone absurdly wrong, like a morphed GIF, scrambled by the corruption of its data. This is what makes them tick. Their lightness of touch belies the weightiness of their industrial materials. The functional bumps into the dysfunctional. They wed. They are real. One can laugh at the pattern-recognition gone wrong, yet still be grounded in the rudiments of her brazen sculptural derring-do."
Educational work
Alongside her artistic practice, Mul works in art education. She currently heads the Master of Fine Arts programme at KASK (Royal Academy of Fine Arts) in Ghent, Belgium, having previously directed an MFA programme in the Visual Arts Department at HEAD–Genève (Geneva University of Art and Design). She has also taught at the Architectural Association School of Architecture (AA) in London and been a visiting tutor at the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam, Central Saint Martins in London, La Cambre ENSAV in Brussels, Universität der Künste (UdK) in Berlin and ENSBA Lyon.
Contact gallery:
Croy Nielsen, Vienna
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Education
MFA History and Theory of Architecture, Architectural Association, London
BA Fine Arts, Maastricht Institute of the Arts, Maastricht
BA Fashion and Textile Design, St Joost School of Art and Design, Breda
Curatorial work
2018-ongoing HERMANY
2013 Door Between Either an Or (curated by Marlie Mul and Judith Hopf), Kunstverein München
Public talks, lectures, readings
2025 ENSBA, École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts, Lyon
2025 Kunsthaus Glarus
2024 UdK, Universität der Künste, Berlin
2023 M HKA, Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen
2021 KASK School of Arts, Ghent
2019 WIELS, Brussels – CANCELLED (book project on cancelled exhibition)
2019 Motto Books, Berlin – CANCELLED (book project on cancelled exhibition)
2019 Croy Nielsen, Vienna – CANCELLED (book project on cancelled exhibition)
2018 FRAC Lorraine, Metz
2018 HEAD, Haute école de art et design, Genève
2016 Kunsthalle Wien, lecture series HiStories / Geschichte(n) (lecture performance)
2016 Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam
2015 Sir John Cass Faculty of Art, Architecture and Design, London Metropolitan University
2014 ICA, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London
2014 IMMA Irish Museum of Modern Art / Goethe-Institute Dublin
2014 Architectural Association School of Architecture, London
2013 Office fédéral de la culture, Post Digital Cultures Conference, Lausanne
Residencies
2023 Frans Masereel Centrum, Kasterlee, BE
2018 WIELS, Brussels, BE
2018 FRAC Lorraine, Metz, FR
2016 Fondation Boghossian, Villa Empain, Brussels, BE
2016 21er Haus/Belvedere Museum, Vienna, AT
2014 Pinakothek der Moderne (Kunstzeitraum/Südhausbau), Munich, DE
2013 BAR Project, Barcelona, ES
2008 Fondazione Ratti, Como, IT