Matt Mullican

Some recent solo exhibitions
Haus der Kunst, Munich 2011
Institute d'art Contemporain Villeurbanne 2010
STUK Kunstencentrum, Leuven 2009
The Drawing Center, New York 2008
Lentos Kunstmuseum, Linz 2006
Ludwig Museum, Cologne 2005

Some recent group exhibitions
Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis; ICA London; Museum of Contemporary Art of Detroit; de Appel, Amsterdam; Culturegest, Lisbon 2009/10
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 2009
Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris 2008
Kunstmuseum St. Gallen 2007
Museu de Serralves, Porto 2006
Kunstmuseum, Stuttgart 2006

Selected publications
Stella Rollig, Matt Mullican: model architecture, Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz 2006
Nina Möntmann, Yilmaz Dziewior (ed.), Mapping a city, Ostfilderen-Ruit: Hatje Cantz 2004
Matt Mullican: More Details from an Imaginary, Universe Museu de Arte Contemporanea de Serralves, Portugal, Hopefulmonster 2001

Selected public and corporate collections
Collections in France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Switserland, United Kingdom and United States.

Matt Mullican's art includes drawing, sculpture, video, painting, electronic media, installation and performance. Since the late 1970s he uses hypnosis in his work, and the process both informs and helps elucidate his work practice, which explores the different ways in which we experience the subjective through media. While Mullican's performances call up 1960s and 1970s predecessors such as Bruce Nauman or Joseph Beuys, the graphic meandering and biomorphic whorls in his drawings of the past decade hark back to Surrealist experiments with frottage and automatic writing. These abstract geometric forms are combined with more representational, repetitive imagery: grids of letters and numbers, transcriptions of song lyrics, and childlike pictures. Mullican has long been interested in the intersection of public sign systems with personal semiotics. In the early 1970s he began producing a series of charts illustrating a fictive cosmology; arrays of pictographic symbols that denote physical, biological, epistemological, and belief systems. The charts were executed on canvas and as sculpture and diffused in formats such as printed media and public installation. His installations often feature grids of his drawings hung side by side on makeshift walls in tightly packed rooms or corridors and are spaces in which it seems possible to lose oneself. Mullican's work of the past three decades stands as an extended, and often profound, meditation on the notion of artistic subjectivity, and on the limits of distancing the ego from the creative self.

Matt Mullican is advisor at the Rijksakademie.