Mungo Thomson
Fireplace
04-MCH -26 – 04-APR-26
Further Down the Line is pleased to announce a solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based artist Mungo Thomson.
Mungo Thomson’s practice draws upon the expanse of popular culture to examine the human condition as it is perceived through both conscious and subconscious states of being. The apparent vastness of Thomson’s field of investigation is reflected in his work’s heterogeneity, which operates
across the areas of film, photography, sculpture, sound, bookmaking, and installation. Seriality and repetition are modes of working for the artist that embody a levity linked to a lineage of West Coast
artists, including John Baldessari and Ed Ruscha. Yet his reiterated variations are meditations on time, more closely tethered to aspects of technology and notions of obsolescence. While at times recalling
art history, they reverberate through spiritualism, wandering cosmologies, and the seemingly arcane.
For his exhibition at Further Down the Line, the artist presents Fireplace, a modified image using lenticular printing – a technique that infuses multiple images into one still picture, allowing it to animate in tandem with the viewer’s movement. This performative technology has its roots in the turning
pictures that arose in 16th-century Europe, long before it was assimilated by machines and widely popularised in the commercial industries. At the height of its visibility, between the 1950s and 1990s, it appeared ubiquitously on cards found in cereal boxes and other collectable treats.
Fireplace deploys lenticular printing to depict a stack of logs that appears either burning or unlit depending on the viewer’s vantage point. Traversing both the pictorial and structural, the work operates at the threshold between the stillness of images and the temporal dimension of its
presentation – here proposed as a domestic setting within the inherently public conditions of display.
Part of a series of work aptly titled Walking Pictures, Fireplace draws from a databank of imagery that has been the subject of an encyclopaedic grouping of films titled Time Life. Split into volumes, the films discharge a disorientating array of pictures taken from books and manuals, ranging from cooking,
exercising, and gardening to art making, asking questions, and tying knots.
Thomson’s work conflates the two dimensional and three dimensional to abridge the worlds of analogue and digital. In its polyvalent nature, it proposes a counterforce to the gluttony and onslaught
of AI and sublimates the temperament in which information is propagated in our digital age. His enduring creations trace our history as ways to reimagine both our present and future.
About the artist:
Mungo Thomson (b. 1969, Woodland, CA) lives and works in Los Angeles. The artist’s recent solo exhibitions include Walking Pictures, Isetan Shinjuku (Tokyo, 2025); Background Materials, MAKI
Gallery (Tokyo, 2025); Time Life and A Universal Picture, Karma (New York, 2025); Collection in Focus: Mungo Thomson, Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, 2024); Sculptures, Aspen Art Museum (Aspen, CO,
2022); and Sideways Thought, galerie frank elbaz (Paris, 2022). Thomson’s work has been part of group shows at major institutions across the globe, as well as numerous public collections such as the
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA);
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Museo Jumex, Mexico City. He has also participated in the 2nd CAFAM Biennale, Beijing; the Pacific Standard Time Performance and
Public Art Festival, Los Angeles; the 12th Istanbul Biennial; and the 2008 Whitney Biennial. The artist’s work was featured in the 2025 New York Film Festival, and he is the recipient of a 2025 Guggenheim
Fellowship.
