Matt Mullican at Peter Freeman

Peter Freeman, Inc. is pleased to announce an exhibition of Matt Mullican’s work, running concurrently with his retrospective Representing the Work at Musée des Art Contemporains au Grand-Hornu, Belgium.

The exhibition brings together several themes and mediums from the multi-pronged practice Mullican has been developing for more than forty years, exploring perspective through banal and specific documentation of his own environment, at a particular place and time: Berlin at 2 a.m.; descriptions of distinct moments from throughout the entire span of a woman’s life; and quotidian, abstract ideas expressed by “That Person,” his alter ego accessed through hypnosis.

Universal Perspective focuses on new works: rubbings on painted canvas, sculpture, including modified objects from the turn of the century, a twenty-foot square banner, and watercolors on wood panels, a medium Mullican is showing for the first time.

In Untitled (64 images from the Cosmology), new and existing signs, some of which have been present in Mullican’s visual vocabulary from the early ‘70s, depict life, death, heaven, hell, angels, demons, fate, and the soul. Their execution in watercolor on wood captures the artist’s spontaneous approach and receptiveness to the myriad possibilities of medium and materials, and highlights his ability to find new forms within a singular narrative.

The exhibition borrows its title from a large-scale rubbing on view: Universal Perspective and Details presents a found image of a classic perspectival drawing technique in its entirety and in isolated details. This rubbing serves as a metaphor for the macro and micro themes present throughout the exhibition.

Mullican explores representation, perception, and how meaning is created and communicated in real life and in real-time versus through media. Treating his impulse to organize information as a subject, and acknowledging this impulse as primeval, his artwork anticipated our current reliance on interfaces and signs.

Matt Mullican was born in 1951 in Santa Monica, California. He earned his BFA from the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles in 1974, and has exhibited extensively internationally since, while also teaching, most recently at Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg, Germany from which he retired in 2018.

Representing the Work is on view at Musée des Art Contemporains au Grand-Hornu (Mac’s), Belgium through 18 October 2020, a catalogue is available.

Other recent exhibitions include Between Sign and Subject, de Young Museum, San Francisco (2019-2020); Banners, Skulpturenhalle, Thomas Schütte Stiftung, Neuss, Germany (2019); Representing the Work, NC-arte, Bogotá, Colombia (2019); The Feeling of Things, Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan (2018); The Sequence of Things, Camden Arts Centre, London, England (2016); and Nothing Should Exist, Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland (2016).