Installation photo credit: Jeff McLane
Opening Reception: Saturday, September 27, 4 – 7 pm
Artist Conversation with Michael Bennett: Saturday, September 27, 3 – 4 pm

RSVP For Artist Conversation Here

Vielmetter Los Angeles is excited to announce Los Angeles-based artist Muna Malik’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, Contours of Memory. On view from September 27th through November 8th, 2025, the exhibition presents a new series of paintings that expand on Malik’s distinctive visual language. We invite guests to join us on September 27th from 3 – 4pm for a conversation between Muna Malik and Michael Bennett prior to the opening reception.

Malik’s works are influenced by the philosophical texts of Rick Dolphijn, as well as her travels to remote countries and continents. The paintings explore concepts of personhood and identity in relation both to the human body and to the physical terrain that it inhabits. Her most recent paintings examine elemental forms in motion – water, earth, and sky seamlessly meld together with other less tangible kinds of matter, in undulating compositions that ripple with kinetic energy.

The sweeping curves, bright glints of light, and surging swathes of color call to mind aerial views of a dramatic landscape below – sea and land are fused and cleaved by sinuous lines that weave through the compositions. Malik’s layered strokes and dissolving edges refuse fixed form and suggest an undercurrent of energy moving beneath the visible surfaces of the paintings. She translates the landscapes of her recent journeys into gestural abstractions that carry the imprint of memory and place, from the austere and icy expanse of Antarctica to the dense forests of Uruguay and the serene stillness of the Berkshires in winter.

Currents of blue and ochre reminiscent of geological strata or tidal cycles flow alongside ribbons of crimson and gold, the colors of sun on the horizon. Drips trace fractures in the surface, illustrating the dynamism and instability of matter in its changing states. Malik’s paintings animate the shifting and porous relationship between body and landscape as figure and ground coalesce.