At the heart of Matt Mullican’s artistic calling is an attempt to comprehend the structure of thoughts. His works are therefore only conditionally referred to as paintings, and he by no means as a painter. Mullican is not interested in the status of a painting as an object intended solely for formal analysis; instead, he approaches it as a medium for establishing a psychological relationship. His works carry a signalling function and direct towards a form of free communication. These are distinct spaces, each with a strong symbolic charge and impressive pictorial value. Matt Mullican’s unique approach to artistic production has resulted in a specific visual system, that is, his subjective model of the five worlds. Thus, in that model, the elemental world of matter and substance is characterised by the colour green, the colour blue signifies the everyday life lived mechanically and schematically, yellow designates the world of art where things are understood symbolically, the black-and-white contrast brings forth the world of language in which the connection between signs and what they signify is broken, leading to abstract thinking, and finally, the colour red represents the pure fiction of the subjective world. Mullican’s works and their components constantly shift across the levels of this subjective model, creating subtle dynamics in their perception. Furthermore, one of the artist’s important narratives revolves around cosmological views and is situated within the “red” world. The artist’s cosmology actually represents the beginning of an extremely fictional and entirely open subjective discourse. No matter how much the artist establishes the framework of its structure, it always remains open to the inscription of new experiences and fresh meanings. (text Dalibor Prančević)
Matt Mullican was born in Santa Monica, California, in 1951 and lives and works in Berlin and New York. He has had many solo exhibitions at important international museums including Hangar Bicocca, Milan (2018), Kunstmuseum Winterthur (2016), Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2013), Haus der Kunst, Munich (2011), and Institut d’Art Contemporain, Villeurbanne (2010), among many others. The artist’s works can be found in major public collections: Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Musée National d’Art Moderne – Centre Pompidou, Paris; Fonds National d’Art Contemporain, Paris; Museo National Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Castello di Rivoli, Turin; Kunstmuseum Luzern, Lucerne, and many more.