Love Comes in Colors

OSCAAR MOULIGNE is pleased to announce Loves Comes in Colors featuring the work of Julian Martin and Purvis Young. The exhibition, on view from December 26, 2024 until March 1, 2025, brings together a selection of works on paper by two distinguished self-taught artists who both employ a language of symbolic imagery to create narratives reflecting observations of daily life and emotional connections to the people and world around them. The title of the exhibition is taken from a suite of multiples by artist Jim Lambie, concurrently on view and shown for the first time.

Julian Martin (b. 1969) is an Australian artist known for his vibrant pastel drawings depicting still-life, portraiture, and biomorphic abstraction. Diagnosed with autism at the early age of two years old, Martin received no formal art training but has been attending the Arts Project Australia center—a Melbourne-based art organization for artists with intellectual disabilities—since 1989 and continues to work there today.

For his drawings, Martin works from photographs and physical objects to create compositions with vivid colors and rich textures through a unique and methodical exploration of form and expression. Pastel marks, applied with a soft but highly controlled and precise touch, saturate the surface with a velvet-like appearance while simultaneously emphasizing the bold forms of his subject, which include figurative images of celebrities, politicians, sports stars, and self-portraits. Everyday tools and objects, also primary sources of imagery, are typically reduced and flattened, and shapes are abstracted to become signs and symbols articulating an elegant geometric formalism.

Purvis Young (1943–2010) was an American artist known for his expressive drawings, paintings, and collages that addressed social issues and drew inspiration from urban subculture, particularly from the neighborhood of Overtown in Miami, Florida, where he lived and worked. Young’s artistic practice embodied a fight for social justice, hope for community, immigration, and otherness, as well as the fragile balance between life and death. An astute observer of street life in his neighborhood (formerly known as the “Harlem of the South”), he expressed human joys and struggles through depictions of the people and city that surrounded him, and of his personal experiences as a Black man in the American South.

Young created works utilizing found material and objects, namely items he discovered in his neighborhood such as discarded wood, carpet scraps, fabric pieces, tabletops, tossed-out books and paper scavenged from trash, which he painted on, or nailed or glued together to produce assemblages. He used an array of motifs and powerful symbols in his work: horses denoted the concept of freedom; grids and padlocks were emblems of imprisonment and struggle; eyes were surveillance by authority and the establishment. Young also depicted people with raised arms to express faith, hope, and redemption. Pregnant women represented future salvation. Boats, trucks, trains, and railroad tracks suggested movement, migration, escape, and opportunity, while angels and large floating heads signified good people and the possibility of goodness in a strife-ridden world.

Young learned to draw from his uncle at a very young age but never received a formal art education. During his period of incarceration as a teenager for breaking and entering, he began to draw prolifically and study the works of master painters such Gauguin, Van Gogh, El Greco, and Rembrandt. Following his release from prison, Young continued his self-education in art history, spending hours in public libraries and immersing himself in art books. He also began executing thousands of small drawings and in 1971, settled in the Overtown district. Young was not only inspired by street life but also by historical documentaries, and expressed a desire to respond to the tragedies he witnessed on television about the Vietnam War. In addition, he was affected by the proliferation of activist murals in the late 1960s, such as the Wall of Respect mural executed by members of the Black Arts movement in Chicago, and in 1972 decided to create a mural of his own, covering a wall of vacant storefronts (former bakeries) on Overtown’s Goodbread Alley with a multitude of paintings executed on materials taken from the streets to create a massive panorama of images. Young’s mural received a great amount of local media attention and by the 1990s, his reputation had reached a national level, further enhanced in 1999 when approximately 3,000 pieces in Young’s studio were acquired by the Rubell Family Collection in Miami.

Young’s highly personal iconography can be described as both spiritual and visionary. Through a visceral language of symbolic imagery and painterly handling, Young created complex juxtapositions, not only between geometric and gestural, but between large (heads) and small (figures), flashing colors, and deep blackness. His assemblages exude a raw, emotional quality that reflect an urgency, in Young’s words, “to paint what’s on my mind.”

With innovative styles in the use of color, line, form, and composition, the two artists in the exhibition are linked by an intense energy and desire to share and communicate a unique vision with the world. Together they voice the idea of art as a transformative power and a vehicle for love and enduring hope.

About the Artists

Julian Martin

Julian Martin was born in 1969 and lives and works in Melbourne. He has attended Arts Project Australia in Melbourne since 1988 and has exhibited extensively in Melbourne since 1990. He has also shown at Fleisher/Ollman (Philadelphia), Museum of Everything (London), MADMusée (Belgium), Phyllis Kind Gallery (NYC), Jack Fischer Gallery (San Francisco), among others. In 2019, his work was featured in the exhibition Nicolas Party: Pastel, The FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY. His work is in public collections including the National Gallery of Victoria, Deakin University, Monash University Museum of Art, and the City of Melbourne (all in Melbourne, Australia); The Museum of Everything, London, UK; Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY, among others. Julian Martin is represented by Arts Project Australia, Melbourne, and Fleisher/Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia, USA.

Purvis Young

Purvis Young was born in Liberty City, Florida in 1943 and spent most of his artistic life in Overtown, both now in the Miami metropolis area. His work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions devoted to outsider art, folk art, and the work of African American artists from the American South, among them History Refused to Die: Highlights From the Souls Grown Deep Foundation Gift, held at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (2018), and Revelations, organized by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (2017).  Recent solo exhibitions include Purvis Young, held at the Rubell Family Collection during 2018–2019. Young’s work can be found in major public collections throughout the United States, including the American Folk Art Museum, New York; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; the Studio Museum of Harlem, New York; and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond.