Mungo Thomson

Mungo Thomson (born 1969) is a contemporary visual artist based in Los Angeles. His wide-ranging, often serial work explores mass culture, everyday perception, representation and cosmology through films, sound, sculpture, installations, drawings and books. Thomson employs counterintuitive artmaking strategies and unconventional methods of audience engagement that privilege overlooked aspects of experience, subtle humor, and the dislodging of expectations. Critics place his work within the tradition of West Coast conceptual art, while also noting its incorporation of the divergent vocabularies of minimalism and the Northern Californian counterculture, New Age mysticism and popular science. Critic Francesco Tenaglia notes that Thomson's later work updates themes of the Pictures Generation and appropriation art: "Using techniques such as mounting, erasing and reframing, he successfully addresses issues such as the permanence of the image, its value and status, and the emergence of aesthetic practices from the diffusion of technological media."

Thomson's work belongs to public collections including those of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Whitney Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), and Walker Art Center. He has exhibited at those four venues, as well as at the Hammer Museum, Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (S.M.A.K.) and MUDAM, among others.