Cat Mueller is an emerging artist based in Canberra, Australia. She is working towards two solo shows in 2017 at CCAS and ANCA Gallery.

Trained as a painter, she graduated with First Class Honours from The Australian National University School of Art in 2015. In 2016 she undertook an artist residency at Canberra Contemporary Art Space.

Mueller was selected for HATCHED: National Graduate Show 2016 at Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts and traveled to Perth with the help of an ArtsACT Out of Round Funding grant. Her work is held in the ANU Drill Hall Gallery collection and the Prime West Perth collection.

Cat Mueller’s practice bounces between vibrant acrylic paintings, dense fluorescent paint-marker drawings, craft, and installation using plastic dollar store items. Her high-key work investigates intense colour relationships and optical effects in order to create visual movement and an energetic viewing experience. Her aesthetic is informed by online culture and aesthetics such as Instagram, the playfulness of childhood, 1990s kitsch, femininity, psychedelia, cult craft crazes and natural phenomena from microbes to sunsets.  Her practice focuses on colour and repetition in drawing, painting and installation. 
 
Her work investigates contemporary tensions. Natural phenomena are rendered in synthetic fluorescent luminosity to create a clash of the formulaic and intuitive; the organic and geometric; the ordered and chaotic; the calculated and spontaneous. Vast fields of gradating colour evoke atmospheric effects comparative to the setting sun but proportionately reference Photoshop effects generated via the Gradient Tool. Her work is an exploration of beauty in the post-internet age.

. In these paintings acrylic brush marks are repetitively applied using spontaneous colour systems that operate optically to warp pictorial space and encourage movement of the eye. Colour relationships within this repetitive system activate the surface, generating optical figure-ground shifts and depth on a flat plane.

These paintings aim for the flatness and vibrancy of a digital screen. Her repetitive painting technique and systems of modulating colour activates pictorial space. The large scale gives a physical reading of the optical devices operating within her paintings and surround the viewer’s peripheral vision. She looks at the subtleties and nuances of colour shifts and soft alterations in a pattern of colours, or ‘systematic gradients’, mixing new colours within the eye as did the Pointillists. 

Currently Mueller’s practice is focused on large-scale acrylic and aerosol paintings . These abstract paintings draw on natural phenomena with a hyper twist. Her paintings are a further investigation into how spray paint can be employed to create atmospheric effects and evoke the sensation of floating. Vast fields of gradating colour surround the viewer’s peripheral vision. These moody fields of colour flicker with her abstracted ‘floaters’ strips. Floaters, phenomena of the eye, are the dancing specks that appear in your field of vision. They are created when clumps form in the clear jelly inside the eyeball casting shadows. They are especially visible when staring at a large light-colored backdrop such as when gazing at the blue sky on a sunny day. Mueller is entranced by this spectacle of vision. She wants to inject this visual energy and theatrical element into the static medium of painting. She uses colour relationships, compositional structure, the contrast of soft and hard-edge paint effects and optical devices to encourage movement of the eye and aid in the creation of a kinetic visual experience to mesmerize the viewer.


 
 
 

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Dawn Fairy (detail), acrylic on marine ply, 122 x 81 cm, 2014.

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