Matt Mullican: Nothing should exist

The Kunstmuseum Winterthur presents an exhibition with the American artist Matt Mullican one of the major initiators of the recent art scene.

In Matt Mullican’s work is about nothing less than the appropriation of reality to the relationship between things and their symbolic representation, between direct experience and systematic order, between subjective interpretation and material world. Born in California in 1951 artist, who now lives in Berlin and teaches at the School of Art in Hamburg, began early on to deal with what the images mean that we encounter in everyday life. What a world represents an image, wondered Mullican. What does it mean when one trusts in the descriptive power of a comic drawing, it is understood literally, and it constructs a possible reality? How can you comprehend what is happening in how the world sees it represented really look like? In drawings Mullican began to develop a fictional world and they check on their Realitätshaltigkeit.

From this work Mullican became world models to cosmologies. He was doing not a valid model, but modeling himself to thinking in ways to the design and not about claiming. A cosmology in five levels, corresponding to the forms of appropriation of the world, Mullican has worked. It begins with the plane of the elements of material things; it is the level of the objects with which we are Blazed daily; in the center of the model is based on the level of the arts, to be created in the images of the world. It follows the level of language, the abstract representation of the things, and it is the level of subjectivity, which indicated all levels in their own way. This model has Mullican played out in a variety of media – on glass windows, flagstone, posters, banners, from the abstract diagram to the imaginary city in which the viewer can move.

The counterpart to these speculations is the adherence of material traces of reality for Mullican. This can be the precipitation of the light to be photograms or molding of objects in Zinngüssen. Best known are Mullican “rubbings” For over thirty years, he creates images that are not paintings or drawings, but rubbings of templates. He has developed a technique that matches his thoughts because the rubbings make clear that we always have images, copies before us. For a comprehensive new work, The Meaning of Things , Mullican went further and sought images to the largest currently existing library, on the Internet.
The exhibition, a parallel event of Manifesta 11 , outlines the basis of selected older works and recent works Mullican world.