Open Minded Painting

Hugo Mulder (’72) aka DHM is a painter, artist and graphic designer from Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He started doing graffiti in ’84 - graphic design in ’90 - and back to the streets with stickers, past-ups and mural painting in 2001. As a senior graphic designer he worked for clients like Nike, Adidas, O’Neill and Coke and runs his own studio for the last 24 years. His street art work is a series of mostly animals all drawn in his well known tribal/tattoo style. Next to that he creates hand painted canvases where the last 10 years he is mostly focussing on the female body shape in a new line driven abstract figurative style. Mulder's latest work shows feminine entities who seem to shape themselves but who are also influenced by the perceptions and opinions from the outside world. Bringing up the question who we really are and would we be different without all these outside influences. Because he is used to creating graphics on the computer and the perfect shapes that can be made there, in this new work he plays with our perception of digital perfection. At first glance his art appears to be an immaculate construction of digital designs. But a closer look reveals handmade compositions of paint, scratches, drawings and cuts applied over periods of weeks. During this extremely labour-intensive process curves and lines are edited by scratching off the paint with a surgical knife up to ten’s of a millimeter. By doing this he tries to create a graphic image as clean and tight as a computer would. Like photo realism, but with graphics. The base of the paintings are build up by a mix of abstract painting and graffiti flavoured forms, put on with paint knives, brushes, markers and spray cans. Linking back to his creative past and influences.