In From Here to Xanadu, Jeff Muhs brings the expressive energy of contemporary American painting into conversation with Asian imagery and ornament. Presented at Art Gotham on St. Marks Place, this new body of work marks an expansion of his painting practice, where sweeping abstraction becomes the ground for figures, landscapes, floral forms, and rhythmic patterns.
Broad arcs of paint and richly worked surfaces meet carefully rendered imagery: drifting clouds, lotus blossoms, dragon medallions, and contemplative figures. Gold leaf introduces a shifting luminosity, while blues, pinks, reds, and other colors carry the work between atmospheric quiet and vibrant intensity. The paintings draw their energy from the encounter between the physical movement of paint and the deliberate structure of recognizable forms.
The exhibition grows from Muhs’s ongoing engagement with the possibilities of contemporary painting—its freedom of gesture, material experimentation, and movement between abstraction and representation. Here, those concerns take on a new vocabulary as he reinterprets Asian visual references within his own evolving language.
From Here to Xanadu proposes an imaginative passage across artistic histories. Its paintings invite viewers into spaces where inherited imagery and contemporary invention coexist, and where beauty emerges through the interplay of movement, pattern, light, and memory.
Jeff Muhs is an American painter and sculptor whose work brings together a lifelong connection to the natural world, a foundation in traditional craftsmanship, and an experimental approach to materials and form.
Born in Southampton, New York, in 1966, Muhs grew up exploring Long Island’s coastal landscape with his father, an artist and third-generation hunting and fishing guide. The light, water, and barrier beaches of the South Shore became enduring influences on his work. His father also introduced him to wood carving, instilling the discipline, close observation, and respect for materials that continue to inform his practice. Muhs earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts in New York City in 1988 and went on to earn world-championship honors in sculpture.
Working across painting and sculpture, Muhs explores the relationship between deliberate composition and the unexpected possibilities of his materials. His Slipstream paintings translate the coastal environment into fluid abstractions of color, light, and movement. In sculpture, his distinctive process, “Dynamic Free Casting,” harnesses concrete’s fluidity, weight, and gravity to create expressive forms that can appear remarkably soft and organic. References to art history and the human figure extend throughout his practice.
In 2018, Muhs received Top Honors at Guild Hall’s Artist Members Exhibition for his concrete sculpture Callipyge. This recognition led to his solo exhibition, The Uncanny Valley, presented at Guild Hall in 2021–2022.
His work is held in museum, corporate, and private collections, including Guild Hall, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Hunter Museum of American Art, and the collection of Beth Rudin DeWoody. Muhs lives and works in Southampton, where his coastal roots continue to inform an evolving artistic practice.
