Martin Mull: Paintings

Mull, a well-known TV and film actor and currently a cast member of Roseanne, is also a serious artist who has exhibited widely in galleries and museums. His oils, watercolors and drawings portray disquieting domestic dramas, hovering between childhood dreams and adult dilemmas, that speak poignantly of the psychic costs of living in the modern world. In Milkman in Heaven, Drunkard's Dream, Alien, Christmas Eve, The Piano Lesson and other works, he sets up a cross-fertilizing dialogue among a few disparate objects at once familiar and strangely dislocated, viewed against largely blank backgrounds suffused with colored lights and shadowed surfaces. Mull's disarming visions compel viewers to look inward at hidden recesses of the self. The Chicago-born artist's informal autobiographical narrative complements 100 color plates. (June)