Steve Martin, Ann Philbin to curate new Santa Barbara Museum of Art exhibit of 'peculiar' paintings

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Martin Mull was best known to audiences for playing comedic characters like Col.Mustard in “Clue” and Gene Parmesan in “Arrested Development,” but a new exhibit opening next year at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art seeks to elevate the role Mull was most proud to inhabit: a respected painter.“Martin Mull: The Joys of Indoor/Outdoor Living,” co-curated by comedian Steve Martin and Hammer Museum Director Emerita Ann Philbin, comes to SBMA next June and runs through October.

It will be the first major museum exhibition of Mull’s artwork in 20 years.The paintings featured include scenes of unassuming houses visited by otherworldly guests, dead-eyed office workers, gravity-defying displays and lambs being led to the slaughter.They play with perspective, color, space and time to illuminate postwar American tensions, be they racial, political or existential.“Martin Mull’s work as an artist will certainly be his primary legacy,” Martin said in a statement.

“After a full-time career in painting, in the last 20 years of his life with his technical gifts fully developed, Martin’s art coalesced into tight, narrative paintings of a peculiar nature.Combining surreal elements with family idioms, he formed his own worried portrayal of American life.”The exhibit, which will take over the museum’s 6,000 square feet of main galleries, will feature more than 50 paintings and drawings by Mull, most of which come from the artist’s estate and the private collections of Mull’s entertainment industry colleagues, including Steve Martin, Jennifer Tilly, and Ted and Nicole Sarandos .

Entertainment & Arts Hammer Museum director Ann Philbin will step down from the post in fall 2024, wrapping up a quarter-century at the helm of an institution that she drastically transformed.The exhibit is the second curatorial collaboration between Martin and Philbin since 2015, when they ...