Opening: Saturday 16 November, 5-9 PM
Exhibition: November 17, 2024 — February 01, 2025
Artist Talk: Saturday 16 November, 7 PM
Mai 36 Madrid is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Matt Mullican. The exhibition is organized in dialogue with two concurrent solo exhibitions by Matt Mullican in Spain, at ProjecteSD Barcelona and 1MiraMadrid, with each venue offering a different perspective on Mullican’s practice ranging over five decades.
The exhibition focuses on Mullican’s large-scale “rubbings”- frottages - for which wooden boards are carved and then transferred onto colored primed canvases by rubbing with oil sticks. They are a hybrid medium - at once prints, drawings, and paintings. Mullican refers to rubbing as the first medium for making reproductions, situating these works within a long history of transferring and sharing images, text and data.
The show brings together 7 rubbings dealing with Mullican’s most fundamental questions, including Mullican’s earliest investigations into reality and perception which he started as a student in the 70s.
The yellow space in Untitled (Element and Empty Interior), 2014 refers to a fictional studio that first emerged in Mullican’s drawings in 1973 as the home for the fictional stick figure he invented and named “Glenn”, with whom Mullican investigated the human perception and empathy for fictional characters, trying to prove that stick figures live lives too. The grid of colors in Untitled (City and Light Patterns) goes back to Mullican’s light experimentations from 1972 and the idea that all we see are mere light patterns, no matter if we look at the physical- or the fictional world - at photos, comic books or at our coffee cup in the morning. Examining the same idea of fictional reality is the work Untitled (Tintin World framed to Elements in Center), 2018, a multicolor detail of a Tintin comic.
The show continues with Mullican’s model of a “cosmology”, a model describing the human existence, from before we were before we are born to after we die. Much like the cosmologies of ancient cultures, Mullican’s cosmology model aims to explain how the world functions. The early 40-part set of drawings Untitled (Details from the Cosmology) from 1982/83 is the first work in which Mullican showed different details within his cosmology, isolating the individual elements within the cosmology in 40 steps. The black and white sketchbook rubbing Untitled (Between Chapters), 2022 depicts the cosmology model in its full circular pattern, where birth and death—in the material and spiritual sense—culminate at the same point, creating a repeatable and continuing life cycle.
The green rubbing Untitled (Coal), 2014 is the only text-based work in the show, representing the green world - “elements” - within Mullican five-color chart. Over the years, Mullican has designed a personal language made of formal and symbolic elements combined with a declination of five recurrent colours (green, blue, yellow, black, and red), each referring to a different “world”. The first world, identified by the color green, is the material world; the second, represented by blue, is everyday life; the third is yellow and indicates the world of culture and science; the fourth is that of language and appears in black and white; and the last world is that of subjective experience, which is rendered in red.
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Matt Mullican (born 1951 in Santa Monica, California; lives and works in Berlin and New York) studied under John Baldessari at the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles and held a professorship at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg until 2019.
For over 50 years, Matt Mullican has developed a diverse body of work that includes drawing, collage, painting, photography, video (including early virtual reality), sculpture, installation, and performance under hypnosis.
Mullican’s work has been exhibited at many international venues, including the Pirelli Hangar Bicocca, Milan (2018) Camden Arts Centre, London; and Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland (2016); Kunsthalle Mainz, Germany (2014); Haus der Kunst, Munich (2011); Tate Modern, London (2007); Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2005); Kunsthalle Basel and Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Switzerland (2001); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1998); Centre for Contemporary Art–Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, and Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany (1996); Nationalgalerie, Berlin, and IVAM, Centre del Carme, Valencia (1995); Wiener Secession, Vienna(1994); and MOCA, Los Angeles (1989 and 1986). He has participated in several collective exhibitions, most recently the 55th Venice Biennale (2013); Singapore Biennale (2011); and 28th São Paulo Art Biennial and Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum, New York (2008).