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Mark Mothersbaugh wears many hats: He’s a prolific composer for film and TV, including the animated Nickelodeon juggernaut “Rugrats”; he’s scored four Wes Anderson films and Marvel’s “Thor: Ragnarock” and is currently working with Pixar. Toddlers who spot the coolly bespectacled, gray-haired septuagenarian at an airport point and gurgle, “Yo Gabba Gabba!” thanks to Mothersbaugh’s painting segment called “Mark’s Magic Pictures” on the wildly popular kids show.
But none of the hats worn by the prolific creator are as iconic — to a certain segment of the music-loving public — as the bespoke red plastic “energy dome” toppers donned by Devo. Or, in laymen’s terms, the “upside-down flowerpots” first worn in 1980 by the lineup Mothersbaugh co-created at Kent State University in the early 1970s. Devo recently performed on “SNL50: The Homecoming Concert” and extended its farewell tour that began in 2023.
On a recent sunny weekday, the Akron, Ohio, native is readying his debut solo exhibition of paintings and screenprints — “Why Are We Here? No. 01” — to open Friday in his own MutMuz Gallery. He’s owned the space, on the hipster-meets-dusty-old-school Chung King Road in Chinatown, for quite a few years, and hung artwork on the walls. But he has never opened it to the public until now.
Why not open it up to others sooner? Along with his sometimes mixed-media creations, the busy multitalent seems to have mixed emotions about selling his artwork. Not that he’s got a dearth of it; he’s been creating nearly a “postcard” a day for 30 years, and now has thousands of carefully curated pieces in archival sleeved books. Most cards include cryptic, sometimes multilingual bon mots written with his beloved Sumi-e brush pens. An example: “It was a one act play … that lasted 75 years.”
Directed by Chris Smith, ‘Devo’ dives into the history of the plastic-clad band of Ohio art students who brought subversive ideas to the 1980s mainstream.
The multi-instrumentalist even penned early lyrics to the Devo song “Uncontrollable Urge” on a card, but mailed it to an acquaintance he was trading postcard art with, then found he’d forgotten the verse by the next band rehearsal.
“After that, I stopped mailing the cards — I started keeping them. I thought I’d never be showing them to anybody.” He guesses there must be about 70,000 pieces. He also has warehouse storage to house his works on paper … and more.
The hoarding tendencies of the self-proclaimed nerd have resulted in 165 visual and audio art exhibitions, including his traveling retrospective, “Myopia.”
With MutMuz, he is going public in a new way. He looks around the high-ceilinged, cement-floored gallery, the top row hung with larger paintings on canvas, the lower with screenprints. “Everything that’s in here, at some point in time, I was very happy to have hanging in my room. And I loved it.”
Mothersbaugh initially envisioned being “very active” with the gallery space — “then I got hit by COVID, and it really changed everything,” he says. Egged on by his family, who urged him to “get the gallery up and going,” he is finally opening its doors. Although fallout from the virus continues — Mothersbaugh has long COVID — he has kept composing (Netflix’s “The Residence” and “A Minecraft Movie” are two recent projects), touring and making artwork. Most of the paintings in “Why Are We Here? No. 01” were created during the pandemic.
All the show’s 10 oil paintings and the 10 limited-edition screenprints are unframed; the only frames in the room are Mothersbaugh’s own distinct silver glasses, correcting his myopia. That said, many of his paintings have hand-drawn sentences around the borders that frame and contextualize the work. But not all of them. Yet.
It’s one week before opening, and none of the art is yet priced or titled. It also seems Mothersbaugh’s heart might break if someone walked away with a purchase. He’s called himself a “hoarder,” and that seems to include his own voluminous quantity of work.
Noted New York and L.A. gallerist Jeffrey Deitch wanted to show his artwork a while ago, says Mothersbaugh. “What freaked him out was that I was selling these really cheap. I told him, ‘I get so many emails from kids, and they send me a picture of my art, and it’s over their bed, and they say, “It’s the first piece of art I’ve ever bought.” ” ’
Deitch told Mothersbaugh his client’s prices had to begin at $50,000. Mothersbaugh, who carries around art-making materials like pens and pre-prepped card stock in a Ziploc bag, liked Deitch, but he declined. Mothersbaugh’s art, like Devo’s music, is often frenetic, funny, intellectual and endearingly odd.
As both a collector and a creator of ephemera, Mothersbaugh’s tastes are darkly poignant. One of the pieces in “Why Are We Here?” was informed by a childhood incident. Gazing at the work, the artist recalls, “I remember screaming for help as I was being chased by a duck when I was 4 years old. And my family sat there. I stepped on a basement window and crashed through it.” That visual scenario may soon hang in someone’s living room.
“If somebody says they want to buy [a painting], I’ll say, ‘Do want me to still finish the border?’ Some, I’ve looked at them, and I saw that I want to put more things on the front too,” he continues, looking specifically at one of the sparer pieces near the front of the gallery. “I could see going over to somebody’s house and it’s hanging on the wall, and I could add something over that plane that’s coming down, or I could write something over the front of the car.”
Mothersbaugh always knew he’d be in a band, but he went to Kent State to study art, especially drawn to printmaking and calligraphy. Conversant on seemingly every cultural and sociopolitical topic under the sun, he sees himself and his work in the category of “social scientist. I’m just documenting things I see. I do it in cartoons. I think I use a lot of cartoon imagery just because it makes me less angry with people if I can turn them into a cartoon, even myself, like down there,” he says, pointing to a rough-hewn self-portrait emboldened by a big clown nose and jutting-out ears. Befitting the postcard size is a duo of 10-cent Cuban stamps.
His inspiration appears more “childhood ducks” or novelty store rejects than, say, Rene Magritte or Lucian Freud. And all his works in oil stem from his original postcard-sized artwork. A more recent topical muse: Jack White. He hasn’t told the musician that the piece, featuring a vintage-looking masked man in a suit and the words “Donc c’est tout. Nashville,” came after the two met. Of the French text, Mothersbaugh bemoans the fact that he’s not multilingual. Instead, “What I do is, sometimes I want to say something, so I Google it and if I like the way it looks in another language, I’ll put it up in another language.”
Devo co-founder Mark Mothersbaugh spent weeks in Cedars-Sinai hospital, hooked up to a ventilator, his mind wracked by violent hallucinations.
Mothersbaugh’s artwork is created within its own work of architectural infamy, the headquarters of Mutato Muzika, the iconic round, neon green building on the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood that houses his production studio. The Chinatown gallery name derives from that studio moniker, itself a portmanteau of “Mutant” and “Potato.”
“Some of this stuff gets used in things,” he says, gesturing toward album art and walking around the light-filled room, incense wafting from the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Assn. across the pedestrian-only way. “Most of it, though, I just do it for myself. It’s like things I hear, things that wake me up in the middle of the night, stuff like that. I just add little disparate pieces.” The end result can evoke a palimpsest feel.
Mothersbaugh is grateful that his “day job” of music funds his collection — and art-creation habits.
As such, his gallery goals appear modest: “To be honest, the business of an art gallery is less interesting than just putting shows up and then talking to people and letting people see things that they could have a reaction to.”
With his many hats, Mothersbaugh is a consummate juggler, though he’s not sure how it all lines up in his head. “I don’t know what my head is. I watch my brothers and sisters, and I think they’re all smarter than me. They’ll make better decisions than me; and then some make worse decisions, sometimes,” he says. “But, still, I think I feel like most people around me are more exceptional. I just happen to be obsessive about putting things together.”
Why Are We Here? No. 01
Where: MutMuz Gallery, 971 Chung King Road, Chinatown
When: 7 to 11 p.m., April 11
Web: MarkMothersbaugh.com
