Michelle Muldrow

Michelle Anne Muldrow (born 1968) is an American painter known for her colorful compositions featuring the familiar interior landscapes of big-box retail stores. The paintings walk a line between abstraction and reality, depicting, in the artist’s words: “…not only the actual structural space and overwhelming chaos of goods, but also the psychology and vernacular of American consumerism.” Muldrow works in gouache, a traditional water-based paint similar to, but more opaque than, watercolor. Her striking compositions draw on the conventions of traditional landscape painting, simultaneously questioning them and utilizing them, to focus on non-traditional subjects. The paintings, whether of a retail interior, a post-industrial landscape, or a reconstructed aerial view of a military base, give the impression that “She’s holding a mirror to your existence, or rather the existence of an era or a generation, and you’d like to believe it’s distorted, or embellished, but you also know that it’s not”.