Artist

Matt Mullican

Born in Santa Monica, 1951

Matt Mullican was born in 1951 in Santa Monica, California and studied at California Institute for the Arts in the early 1950s. His work, discussed widely internationally, refuses general art categorizations and classifications. Since the end of the 1970s, he has been concerned intensely with performances under hypnosis. In the state of trance, Mullican has since then represented the other person about whom he is thinking in his work, and tries to trace out the relationship between artistic work and processes of projection. In so doing, at issue is not a subjective psychoanalytic process, but a typical situation in which action takes place within a context of significant symbols. In the 1980s the development of a complex sign system stood at the center of Mullican’s interest, which claimed to be an comprehensive cosmology. In engaging with the signs, pictograms, and images that surround us in everyday life, pictograms, and images expanded through products of fantasy, Mullican generates by way of repetition, contextualization, and mutual references a highly complex personal language system, with which he tries to grasp his cosmology in models. Encyclopedic, utopian, universal, cosmological are only some of the terms that obtrude in this context. Since the late 1980s, he has also used newer technologies to develop and represent this cosmology, like the computer and the Internet. In the virtual media space, in so doing city-like ordering systems emerge as models of cognitive perception, or as models of changing perspectives on various layers of perception that the artist symbolizes using color.

Exhibitions
Exhibitions
Matt Mullican: Representing the Five Worlds – 50 Years of Work
The tenth solo presentation of the artist with the gallery
11 Sep 2020 - 07 Nov 2020
Mai 36 Galerie
Zurich
Exhibitions
Matt Mullican: Nothing should exist
The Kunstmuseum Winterthur presents an exhibition with the American artist Matt Mullican one of the...
12 Jun 2016 - 16 Oct 2016
Kunstmuseum Winterthur
Zurich
Exhibitions
Matt Mullican: The Sequence of Things
For over 40 years, Matt Mullican has been developing a codified language of symbols and diagrams in an...
30 Sep 2016 - 08 Jan 2017
Camden Art Centre
London
Exhibitions
Matt Mullican: The Feeling of Things
Pirelli Hangar Bioccca presents “The Feeling of Things”, the first retrospective by Matt Mullican...
12 Apr 2018 - 16 Sep 2018
Pirelli HangarBicocca
Milan
Art Spaces
Massimo De Carlo Pièce Unique
Galleries in Paris
Mai 36 Galerie
Galleries in Zurich
Massimo De Carlo London
Galleries in London
Massimo De Carlo, Milan
Galleries in Milan
Massimo De Carlo, Hong Kong
Galleries in Hong Kong
Capitain Petzel
Galleries in Berlin
Massimo De Carlo, Palazzo Belgioioso
Galleries in Milan
Massimo De Carlo, Casa Corbellini-Wassermann
Galleries in Milan
Related Content
Interviews
“The Feeling of Things”: an Interview with Matt Mullican – Read
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