Nov 21, 2008–Feb 5, 2009

Matt Mullican: A Drawing Translates the Way of Thinking

For over three decades, New York-based artist Matt Mullican (b. 1951, Santa Monica, CA) has created a complex body of work concerned with systems of knowledge, meaning, language, and signification. Since the end of the 1970s, he has also conducted performances and created drawings while under hypnosis as a means to explore the nature of behavior. Matt Mullican: A Drawing Translates the Way of Thinking includes work from throughout Mullican’s artistic career, emphasizing the role of drawing in his attempt to understand, organize, and categorize experience. Mullican’s practice, surveyed through drawings, collages, video, and installation, confronts the nature of subjective understanding, rationality, perception, and cognition—in essence proposing a “picture” of the world through the medium of drawing.

Matt Mullican

Matt Mullican’s vast and prolific practice encompasses drawing, sculpture, video, performance, and installation. Ranging from schematic diagrams and arcane symbols to explicit text-based drawings and self-created cosmologies, Mullican’s work classifies, orders, and describes an understanding of the world, using drawing to confront the nature of subjectivity, perception, and cognition. Since the late 1970’s, Mullican has also conducted performances and created drawings while under hypnosis as a means of exploring the nature of behavior. Through his performances, Mullican has developed the mantra, “I love to work for truth and beauty” which contextualizes and motivates his artistic practice.

Born in Santa Monica, CA in 1951, Mullican presently lives and works in Berlin. He received his B.F.A. from the California Institute of the Arts in 1974. Mullican’s work has been featured in numerous exhibitions throughout the United States and in Europe including solo shows at the Ludwig Museum, German (2005); Stedelijk Museum Schiedam, The Netherlands (1998); and Centre for Contemporary Art, Poland (1986), among many others. An installation of his work and performance were included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial and in 2009 The Drawing Center presented Mullican’s most comprehensive solo exhibition in the United States to date.

Curated by João Ribas

Credits

The Drawing Center's 2008-2009 exhibitions and public programs are made possible, in part, with the generous support of the Carnegie Corporation, Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, and with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a State agency.