Matt Mullican

The works presented here are mainly concerned with systems of knowledge, meaning, language and symbolism. Part schematic, part cosmological charts, Mullican’s ordered, symmetrical works belie an enormously ambitious artistic aim, to contain and make sense of the universe. Characterised by rough geometric patterns, Mullican’s diagrams and writings on canvas offer free access to the artist’s psyche.

Although he is aware that a complete universal collection and depiction is impossible, he continues pursuing this project undeterred. The two illustrative models in Mullican’s artistic creed are cartography and cosmology. In the so-called Charts he describes the splitting of a thing from the objective material reality to its purely subjective idea. Step-by-step, they explain the perception of reflective connections in which we abstract everyday things and circumstances.

With regard to each individual work, this means that he sees an object or its depiction simultaneously as part of a universe and as a universe in itself. In these works, Mullican elaborates on the relationship between perception and reality, between the ability to see something and the ability to represent it. In this sense, the artist precisely expresses one of the key points of the exhibition’s curatorial rationale: the ability to be aware of the criteria that are adopted to describe the outside world from an individual point of view.

Matt Mullican (Santa Monica, USA, 1951). He lives and works in Berlin and New York. Mullican’s work has been exhibited internationally since the early 1970s in venues including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Haus Der Kunst, Munich, the Nationalgalerie, Berlin, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. His works can be found in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Cincinnati Art Museum and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC.