This recently completed series of nine-story abstract murals was commissioned for a new life-science complex in Burlingame, CA by King Street Properties and SLATE Art Consulting.
"Although architectural in scale, my approach to these murals was as building-sized paintings: each one composed of more than 20 layered, gestural passes, in a process that mirrors how I work in the studio." says artist Nicole Mueller, "Over the course of five months spent on site, I routinely painted over entire sections that had previously taken hours to develop, allowing only pockets of earlier layers to remain. The resulting compositions—shifting color fields, stacks of organic forms, and embedded histories of mark-making—are as much a record of time and impermanence as they are finished surfaces. Preserving the immediacy and energy of my studio practice at nearly 100 feet high became the project's central goal. This project represents the largest expression of my painting practice to date. I've created large-scale public commissions, but scaling my painterly language of mark-making to a nine-story building pushed me to rethink gesture, color, and perspective at an architectural scale."
Situated in one of the most transit-rich areas of the Bay Area Peninsula, directly along the waterfront and less than one mile from San Francisco International Airport, the murals harness the movement and transient energy of their surrounding environment. Long, swooping linework weaves in and out of layered forms, suggestive of Burlingame’s native flora, the silhouettes of eucalyptus leaves, nearby networks of highways, divergent pathways of air traffic control, or numerous other forms of movement & transportation, all intersecting like arteries, connecting & shaping the landscape in ways both visible and unseen.
Click here to see more photos of this project.